


Not The End

by Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor, Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Character Development, M/M, Prideshipping, Slice of Life, post-dsod
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2018-09-27 08:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 38,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9989699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Prismatic%20Bell
Summary: Yuugi's wasn't the only story that began in Atem's tomb.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maidendays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maidendays/gifts).



> Akh: n. In Egyptian mythology, the soul after death given physical form, and able to walk among the living.
> 
>  _My story is just beginning . . . and it begins in light!_ \-- Mutou Yuugi

“I wondered if I'd ever see you again.”

There's sand, coarse and fine, blowing against his legs. The wind is cool, the humidity nil. The roof ledge he's sitting on is made of mud and sandstone. This isn't Domino.

“You had the chance. You didn't take it.”

“I was slightly busy saving you.”

Kaiba says nothing. The voice coming from over his head and behind his shoulder falls silent, and then there's a slightly awkward flurry of limbs to his left and the owner of the voice sits next to him. Kaiba doesn't turn his head, but his peripheral vision is excellent, and what he sees disturbs him.

The man sitting there is petite enough to be snapped into pieces with one good shake. But his skin is so dark Kaiba can barely see him, an amorphous shape clothed in linen and moonlight, and there's something else, something he can't place, until he can.

“Your eyes are the wrong color.”

“You've never seen my eyes.”

“I don't have time for talking to dreams. I have a pitch and bitch at ten.”

“That sounds interesting.” The edges of the dark mouth quirk upward, and Kaiba makes a noise of dissent in the back of his throat.

“It's a group of morons trying to come up with the next Duel Monsters in gaming and thinking they're original because they have college degrees.”

“Then maybe you should stop asking them, and look for hidden potential.”

Kaiba looks back out at the desert. The wall beneath him is still warm from the sun, but the city is dark. He thinks he might even be able to see the Milky Way. 

“You're not dreaming,” the figure to his left says. “You called me back.”

“No I didn't.” Far in the distance, he can hear water. A river? Maybe. “Yuugi did.”

“You made it possible. Now I can come and go.” There's another small flurry of movement. Now that he knows the color of the skin, Kaiba can make out legs. “Sleep. We'll talk another time.”

“I don't talk to dreams,” Kaiba says. There's no answer, just the soft shush of fabric as the figure walks away. He raises his voice, and wonders even as he does it why he bothers. “I don't talk to dreams!”

\----------------------

“You look better.”

“If you were one of my employees, I'd fire you for that.”

The figure with the dark skin and red eyes sits next to him. There's a lantern in his hands tonight, and in its light his bare legs look like streaks of onyx set into the golden-yellow stones beneath them. 

“Last night you were just tired. Tonight you look intrigued.”

“Some girl stole her supervisor's ID and skipped her lunch hour to get into the meeting because she was so damned insistent she was the one with the next big idea.”

“And?”

Kaiba is silent. The sound in the background is definitely a river. At long last he shifts.

“I decided to take your advice.”

One dark eyebrow raises in a gesture of curious good humor. Kaiba's mouth thins. She surprised him. He hates being surprised.

“I think she was right.”

“What did she propose?”

Kaiba wonders if he could just summon up an image of the meeting. He's controlled his dreams before, sometimes; he's pretty sure therapy is a bunch of bullshit, but lucid dreaming isn't. 

But this isn't like a normal dream, and nothing happens. The image behind his eyes of the girl in her frayed T-shirt and worn blue jeans stay only there, behind his eyes, and he sighs.

“Duel Monsters is just a card game. She's right about that. I've created tech that elevates it to something that allows you to manipulate the world around you with nothing but cards, and to play it anywhere instead of needing a dedicated playspace like most tabletop gaming, but it still uses cards. There's never been any diversification. No cartoons, no comics, no computer games, it's the only successful tabletop game in the world to have no tie-ins at all. It's a huge untapped market.” A huge untapped market he was too busy coding Atem—the _right_ Atem—to notice, and somehow that's worst of all.

“She proposed a tie-in?”

“A platform RPG using the Duel Links Network software that lets you play as the characters from the cards. You can take them on quests or just do direct battle in multiplayer free mode. She showed up with this laptop I'm pretty sure she pulled out of somebody's trash and a seven-minute demo already coded.”

The figure's brows furrow. “How did you end up with an employee who shows up with equipment that old?”

“She's part of the Gateways intern program. I'm more surprised she has a personal laptop at all than I am that an intern decided to break in on an R&D meeting.”

“What is Gateways?” 

He pauses. For being a dream, there are a hell of a lot of things this other person doesn't know.

_Unless it's not a dream. Unless it's really him._

_Bullshit._

_One way to find out, right? You know what you'd want the real Atem to say. And you know he wouldn't say it._

“It's a proficiency-based intern placement system. Most internships look for people attending college or prestigious high schools. The KaibaCorp standard internship program is called Starshoot. Gateways is for kids who have brains but not the means to reach higher education. You accused me of not seeing hidden potential. I see it everywhere.”

The figure to his left breaks into a grin Kaiba can't interpret, equal parts mirth and sadness.

“The kind of program you should have been in?”

Getting off the wall the standard way would involve having to waste time pulling his legs back up onto it. Instead he jumps down.

_Fuck!_

“I wasn't mocking you.”

“Go away.”

“It _is_ possible to have a conversation where we're not screaming at each other, Kaiba.”

“Go _away!_ ”

_It's a dream, a dream, you can change it, here he's yours to control._

He turns around, clamps down on Atem's shoulders, watches those red eyes snap shut in pain, feels the collarbones shift . . . and lets go.

_Or maybe not. Not even here._

“I don't want to hear your opinions. If you're a dream, leave. If you're not a dream, duel me.”

“I have no deck.”

“Make one.”

“It doesn't work that way, Kaiba. Only the things buried with me can come with me. That's how you called me back.” A pause. “You must have read some things about appropriate burial. Otherwise you wouldn't have been in such a hurry to retrieve the Puzzle before seventy days passed.”

“I don't wait.”

There's no answer. He stalks another twenty meters or so before he turns around, but there's nothing to look at but an empty road and blowing sand.

\---------------------

“Big bro? Did we tank Duel Links when I wasn't looking?”

“Somewhere between Advanced Algebra and Remedial English,” Kaiba says, and Mokuba lets out the kind of giggle he's fast growing out of. Nobody outside this room would understand the joke. They'd probably be stunned there was one. 

“No, really. Somebody from Development just handed me an inter-office envelope and asked if I'd bring it up to you, and your signature's already on it.”

Kaiba takes the folder. <<8994-96-16 SKKC>> is written across the top. 

“This. No, we're not abandoning Duel Links. Someone in R&D actually came up with a half-decent idea I thought we should follow up on, that's all.”

“Cool! Can I see?”

“Be my guest.” Kaiba opens the envelope and spreads out its contents. Mokuba picks up a concept drawing and stares.

“This looks _awesome!_ ”

Kaiba taps a small stack of index cards on the table. They're full of sprite stats. Shinsato Kane, she of the frayed clothes and outdated laptop, has clearly never put together a proposal before in her life, but she's organized. 

“Mokuba,” he says. “If someone made a video game where you could play as Duel Monsters characters, would you play it?”

Mokuba looks like someone just handed him a booster pack of nothing but ultra-rares. “Is that what this is?”

“It could be.”

“No _way!_ Like, you actually get to be the monsters in battles and stuff? _Everybody_ would play that, are you kidding? ”

“Hmm.” He glances up from the sprite stats. He doesn't even have to look closely at them to know the research is impeccable. Either she's got a drive to match some of the top heads at KaibaCorp, or she's pushing too hard to impress him. He needs to know which.

He pulls out a notepad, scribbles out a few things, slides two sheets of paper back into the envelope with her drawings and stats before closing it and signing it again. Then he takes a debit card out of his desk and holds it out.

“Take this back down and then go get yourself something to eat next door, okay?”

Mokuba nods. “I can get you some ramen, they do it to go now.”

“I'll be fine.”

“They have tempura, too.”

“I'll eat at home, Mokuba. Go have dinner.”

\--------------------

“Did you eat?”

He never coded this. He _definitely_ never coded this. What the Nile looked like during the second Period of Confusion was not one of his research topics. But here he stands on its shore, staring out past papyrus reeds and water lilies and small flickering fish to a barefoot Atem standing in the water.

“Did you bring a deck?”

“I told you already. It doesn't work that way.”

“Then let me sleep.”

“You are sleeping.”

“Then stop making me dream.”

“You're not dreaming.”

“You're not making sense.”

“I believe it was Aristotle who said 'there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy'.”

“That's Shakespeare.”

Atem wades ashore. “I know it best as 'Yuugi's homework,' I beg your pardon.”

“Hmph.”

“You're angry with me.”

“I don't have time for this.”

“Were you planning to be somewhere else?”

He doesn't answer. He just stares across the Nile at the pyramids he's never actually touched and the temples he's never been in.

“You fought hard to give me an _akh_. You could at least say hello.”

Kaiba looks at him and says nothing. Atem gazes out, his eyes following the same path as Kaiba's only moments before.

“Look it up. Do some reading. We'll talk again.”

\-----------------------

“Seto?”

He yanks his glasses off his face and sleeves them at once. Mokuba's seen them often enough—god knows he's fallen asleep with them on and woken up with them folded carefully next to his hand—but as far as he knows, nobody else has a clue. Even his optometrist sees him under a different name. Some people might call it vanity. He calls it preserving his reputation. And Mokuba isn't always alone.

“I tracked down the issue with the Duel Links main terminal. It wasn't us, it was DUELMAX. The German servers. They had a huge storm there two days ago and when the power came back on it fried two of their servers. They're trying to get back online now, but in the meantime I rerouted through—what are you reading?” He turns his head upside down to look at the title of the book, then gives Kaiba the same scared stare he offered up when Kaiba went to test the dimensional-dueling system. “Seto . . . ”

Kaiba tries to come up with a story that doesn't sound completely insane. He knows what Mokuba is thinking. For awhile, he was thinking it himself.

“Just research. We're putting out an RPG based on a game based on ancient Egyptian myths, I thought I'd better read up. I have no idea how Pegasus decided to market this stuff to kids.”

Mokuba snickers. “Why, did you get to the one about Set and Horus yet?”

“Where did you learn about Set and Horus?”

“My history class was boring so I looked it up on Wikipedia.”

Kaiba rubs his temples. “Mokuba, Wikipedia _is not a citeable source._ ”

“Yeah, but all the good stuff's there!”

“Mokuba?”

“Yeah?”

“Go get dinner.” He pulls out his card and watches Mokuba's shoulders slump. “Get a pizza. We can eat up here.”

Mokuba's face breaks into a grin, and Kaiba watches him take off across the office.

“Mokuba?”

Mokuba skids to a stop. “Yeah?”

“Don't order salad. And knock next time.” He pulls his glasses out of his sleeve. “Privacy, do you mind?”

Mokuba snickers and bangs the door open before swinging it shut. Kaiba settles his glasses back on his nose, then reaches for a tablet.

If he's going to tell Mokuba he's doing game research, he should probably take notes.

\---------------

“Give me back my clothes.”

“I didn't take them.”

“I want them back.”

“You were the one who chose to sleep in your underwear. This is not my fault.”

Kaiba does his best to glare. It's freezing outside, even though the stones of the building are still warm from the sun. Bullshit. It's a desert. Deserts should be hot, not cold enough to facilitate shivering.

“We could go inside.”

“Give me. My. Clothes.”

“Do you know what an akh is, now?”

“An akh is the son of a bitch who brought me here mostly naked so he could ask me stupid questions.”

One side of the dark mouth twitches up in a wry smile. Atem reaches for the clasp on his cloak, and holds it out. Kaiba fights the urge to either knock it out of his hands or snatch it and throw it around his own shoulders. 

“I can't bring you clothes any more than I can bring a deck, Kaiba. Like me, you come here only with what you have.”

Kaiba just glares. What he has is a migraine. He's probably due to get his glasses changed again. Hypermetropia can kiss his ass. He didn't “choose” to go to bed unclothed; he went because his vision was so blurry trying to dress would have been an exercise in futility. 

The cloak settles around his shoulders without his permission, and Atem heads for the darkened doorway behind them. Kaiba considers staying where he is; he loathes the idea of following Atem like a desperate puppy. Then he reconsiders: the cold, the wind, the lack of clothing, the very real feel of sand blowing against his skin and into his face and eyes. 

It's dark beyond the door. Kaiba has a vague nonsense thought— _you'd think the afterlife could afford electricity_ —and dismisses it. 

“I put out the torch. Your eyes are red.”

“So are yours.” He assumes. He can't actually see them tonight. They might still be the color of old dried blood, or they might have finally faded back to purple.

“Not the same.”

“Tell me why you keep bringing me here. You won't duel. You won't answer anything. I'm not interested in pointless taunts.”

“Tonight, I did have something I thought might interest you. But I think you'd be better served with time to rest. No fair player brings something new to the table when their opponent is at multiple disadvantages.”

“I can take you.”

“Perhaps so. But not tonight.”

“You brought me here, you're not going to waste my time.”

“I didn't realize you were ill when I called you. Rest.” Atem meets his eyes. If Kaiba were the kind of person to sigh in frustration, he would; _I will not be moved,_ those eyes say. _I have been dead for three thousand years. I have all the time in the world to tell you no._

“I'm not ill.”

“You're not well.”

“Tell me what you brought me here for.”

“I told you before I could bring only what was buried with me, and couldn't duel you. But that doesn't mean I own no games. I thought you might enjoy senet.”

“I've seen people play senet. It's just a simpler version of chess.”

Atem has the nerve to look offended. “I beg your pardon, it is not 'just a simpler version of chess.' I've played chess.”

“Then show me what you think makes it worth my time.”

“Another day.”

Kaiba wants to snarl. It won't help the pain in his head, but it might help the one in his brain. Instead he turns on his heel to storm out.

“Kaiba.”

“ _What?_ ”

Atem's face is barely visible under the moon, nothing more than a hint of cheekbones and a suggestion of a smile. He holds out one hand.

“If you're on your way, I would appreciate if you gave back my clothes.”

\------------------

“I don't give a damn, just make it work.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kaiba leaves the fourth floor with a raging headache and six hours' worth of extra work—if he's lucky. Some days he wonders what it would feel like, being stupid enough to dummy out over two thousand sprites on a brand new gaming system. There's an intern on the sixth floor who could do better. 

Speaking of the intern, he thinks, and heads for the elevator. He sent the spec envelope back to her four days ago and hasn't heard anything since. Maybe she got scared off. A cute little side project for school doesn't stack up much against even some of KaibaCorp's lesser achievements.

She's not hard to find. There's a corner of the sixth-floor breakroom wallpapered with drawings, character spec sheets, notes. The intern herself is sitting on the floor pinning things to a corkboard, and jumps when he stops a couple of feet from her drifts of paper to stare down at her. 

“Shinsato.”

“Sorry! Sorry . . . . ” She scrambles to her feet and dusts her hands on her knees. “Did you need something?”

“A timely response to interdepartmental mail.”

“Sorry,” she says again. “I've been working until curfew, but someone came through yesterday and threw out almost _everything_ so I was trying to redo it to send to you today—”

“Amazingly enough, I have an email address.”

Now she looks truly apologetic. Still not afraid, but upset. She's fucked up, and she knows it.

“I don't have these last two scanned yet. I'm sorry.”

“Why aren't you using Aspiration?”

“I tried putting it on my computer and it crashed. There aren't any spares in the department, I asked Sonoda-san and he said—”

“That's such bullshit. Tell him I said you should have an assigned laptop. It's company procedure.” He lets his eyes run over the drawings on the walls. This must be what game development looked like some time in the 1970s. “Explain this to me.”

“Okay, so—” She plops back down in the middle of her papers. “What I was thinking is, you know how in The Sims you can buy the game and it's totally functional, but if you want to do more stuff with it you buy expansion packs? I came up with this idea where you can buy the main game and it has a plotline you can complete, but if you want to keep playing and go through more quests and stuff, you'd buy an expansion pack. It lets the game keep growing with existing code and actually retains more players because they don't have to pay a monthly subscription, so if they can't afford an expansion when it comes out they can save up and buy it later. So—” She pushes a stack of papers out of her way, picks up another one, looks at it, puts it down, then reaches for another. “Okay. This one. This is the outline for the main quest, the one you'd buy without needing to expand anything. I had this idea, there are millions of Duel Monsters players worldwide, right, but what are the monsters you hear about again and again? The pro players' monsters, like yours. Or Black Magician, or the Harpy Ladies. Most people who play the card game don't play those cards. Some of them aren't even available to the general public. So I have a slate of six playables, but only two of them are what I'd call 'legendary' cards. Those are the specs you asked me about changing. I guess we _could_ , but—I kind of like the idea that the characters kids can play as are the ones they're more likely to have in their decks.”

Kaiba makes a noncommittal noise. _Keep going._

“So. What does every really good video game RPG out there start with? Underdogs. It's boring if your team is the best of the best and you can just trample everything you lay eyes on. But the Duel Monsters world already has all of these characters way stronger than your playables, and if you put them in as NPCs people are going to throw a fit. That's where the main plotline comes in. You can't play as them because they've ceased to exist, and you have to get them back.” She glances up at his face, then pulls out another piece of paper. “I was thinking a curse that shattered the world. There are two magicians among the playables and magic users usually get really overshadowed in video game RPGs, so it's a good way to set this one apart. They have to retrieve a specific series of artifacts to appease the gods, whose temples have been taken over by monsters let out of the cracks in the world, and put the world back together and release the legendaries. I don't have a whole lot of actual drawing done for this, but I've got a template for the first dungeon. Well, temple. Gamers would probably call them dungeons. But they're not for prisoners, they're literally temples you have to reclaim.” She hands up the piece of paper. Kaiba glances it over. Two minutes on CAD would have been faster and cleaner, he thinks, and makes a mental note to check in with Sonoda by the end of the day. 

“The next R&D meeting is in two days. If you can have a full proposal done to share and it passes muster I'll approve you to put together a dev team. Impress me.”

“Yes, sir!”

\--------------------

“That move is illegal.”

Atem raises his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

“You said pawns don't stack, they just exchange places—”

“The moving pawn moves the opponent's pawn back to the beginning.”

“You're making that up!”

“I am not, it's not my fault you didn't listen to the rules—”

“Fine, move me back. I'm still going to kick your—what the _hell!_ ”

Atem grins. On his new face, with ruby-red eyes and midnight skin, it looks somehow saner than it ever did on Yuugi's.

Still slightly demented, but only slightly.

“I swear I'm bringing my own dice next time.”

“Dice don't have the right number of sides.”

Kaiba offers him the most piercing are-you-fucking-kidding-me stare he can manage in the semidarkness of moonlight and fire. “Are you telling me you shared a host body with a kid who works in a game shop for _eighteen months_ , and you've never seen a D16?”

Atem at least has the grace to look embarrassed. “By all means, try to bring one if you think it's going to help you. Do you want to go for another round?”

“Not with these dice. What do you mean, 'try to' bring one?” He's never liked those words. Atem just shrugs.

“There are a great many things about the afterlife I don't know. I assume if you put something in your pocket or hold it in your hand you could bring it with you, since you come here in your clothes. But I can't guarantee it works that way, because I don't know. It's not as though I have floods of visitors.” He sweeps the senet pawns into a reed bag. “I suppose that's the kind of thing that would interest you, though, isn't it?”

“Then I'll try it. I need to know how to get back to the roof from here.”

Atem stands up and offers him a hand. He considers not taking it, just to make a point, and then decides being a sour loser is for people who have no hope of besting their opponents. Instead he lets Atem help him off the ground. “You don't have to leave from the roof. You can go from anywhere, the same way you first came.”

“Then I'll see you soon.” Maybe tomorrow. It depends on his workload. And Mokuba's homework.

“May you hear only good things in your day.”

There must be an appropriate response to something like that, but he's not sure what it is, and so instead he just heads for the door into the courtyard. Probably he could vanish into thin air if he had a better understanding of how to travel between the two planes, but the door is easier. 

By the time he looks behind him again, Atem is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even things buried deep can come back to light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOLY CRAP YOU GUYS ARE ALL SO NICE. It's been a really, really long time since I've gotten this many comments on anything, and they really make my day. (One came in right after I had a really awful night at work and I went from crying to laughing. A+ use of my time and reading ability, 10/10 would read again.) Thank all of you so much!
> 
>  
> 
> _There was barely room to breathe_  
>  Getting the skeptic to believe  
> That the goal wasn't to leave  
> One of us broken  
> If it's true nothing gets close to you  
> For fear of melting down  
> Then I've become the chosen one  
> An example for the crowd
> 
>  
> 
> \--"Room to Breathe," Anthony Rapp

“The rice was excellent. I didn't try the sushi. Something about seafood going warm in a desert.”

Kaiba settles in on the bench. “No ill effects?”

“Well, I'm still dead.”

Kaiba snorts. It's warmer in Atem's world today, not yet unpleasant but also no longer chilled. Atem pulls out the bag of senet pawns, and suddenly the thing nagging at the back of Kaiba's mind comes to the front.

“Where's your crown?”

Atem's smile doesn't look demented, not anymore. Now it just looks mischievous.

“Maha'ad's been after me for 'not being properly decorous'. I decided he was due for a reminder it can always be worse.”

“So you decided to parade around with no jewelry on.”

“He's lucky I knew you were coming today, or I might have done it naked.”

“There's a mental image I really needed, thanks. It's your turn.”

The smile drops off Atem's face, replaced by sheer bewilderment. “You want me to go first?”

“I'll go first when I win.”

It occurs to him, as Atem pulls out the D16, that without massive amounts of jewelry weighing him down Atem looks incredibly young—less an untouchable, ageless god and more Kaiba's own peer. Kaiba thinks about some of the reading he's done, and hides a snort, wondering how many of those 'interpretations' were bullshit and just how much Atem wears might simply be meant to hide his age and physical size under a layer of dazzle. 

“I take it your work is going well.”

“No worse than usual. Sonoda suggested adult mods for the DLN. I'd actually started thinking he was going to stop the stupid suggestions.”

Atem considers the board. “Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but why do you keep him?”

“Because when he's not being an idiot, he's a really skilled coder. And he keeps his department in order.”

“What about your new project?”

“Nile Blue? Not much of anything. No title yet. A few early world layouts. I told Shinsato to take the playable count down to four. Black Magician Girl, Goddess of Whim, Legendary Flame Lord, and Sealmaster Meisei. She's not happy about it, but she'll live.”

“Why cut it down?”

Kaiba considers his next move, then glances up. Atem is watching him intently. Studiously, almost. Interested.

“Because we just released a system that's going to change the world forever. The DLN and the Crystal Cloud have huge repercussions across disciplines. If we release multiple major unconnected projects in a single year, it looks desperate. Nile Blue is a completely different direction from where we've been going. I don't think it's bad to diversify—”

“But you want it to be obvious it _is_ that, and not grasping for something to work.”

“Exactly. Your turn.”

Atem studies the board. “House of Life. My roll again. How is Mokuba taking it?”

“Are you kidding me? I don't remember the last time I saw him this excited over something.” Kaiba stares at Atem's pawns. He only has two left on the board. “I'm worried about him.”

“Why?”

“He's freaking out about his high school exams. I mean _really_ freaking out. He's got another year in junior high and he's already studying for entrance exams. Yesterday I came home and found him asleep at the kitchen table on top of an English textbook.” Kaiba doesn't elaborate on what ran through his mind when he saw it, nor does he bother telling Atem his back is sore from finding a way to lift Mokuba out of his seat to at least put him on the sofa. Waking him seemed too heartless, leaving him unspeakable. 

“Is it such an issue?” Atem is a single roll away from a win, but he's not paying attention to the board. Kaiba meets his eyes.

“Language isn't his strong point. He can deal with basic conjugation and vocabulary but he's really struggling with pronunciation and reading comprehension. I started coming home early on Wednesdays to tutor him because I thought it might help, but he's still hellbent on this idea he's going to test low. Half the schools he's looking at don't even have a language requirement. Not for first years.”

Atem sets the board aside. No great loss; it was Atem's roll and he was three spaces away from a win, with four pawns still on Kaiba's side. Better try again. 

“Will it affect his life so much?”

“In upper-level management? Yeah.” He stops to ponder. “Think about it like having a vizier or head of trades who couldn't speak Greek.” 

Atem makes a noise of understanding. “I see. But you're afraid his fear will overshadow his future until he sabotages himself.”

“Something like that. He has plenty of time. But the way he's going at it you'd think he didn't have any at all.”

“Then all you can do is support him,” Atem says. “If I had any help to offer, I would. But I'm afraid the way I learned Akkadian probably wouldn't be of much use, and I only know a single phrase in English.”

He shouldn't ask. He really shouldn't. It's probably something Atem learned from Yuugi's friends, and it's undoubtedly either obscene or nonsense. 

But—

“Yeah? What's that?”

Atem's face takes on a strange expression: equal parts mischief and bewilderment. Kaiba would bet cash he doesn't actually have any idea what he's about to say.

“Eat shit and die.”

It's not particularly funny, but he has a sudden image of Atem sitting regally on his throne dismissing some offensive idiot with the words _Begone, or I'll curse you with the words of my advisors_ and then breaking into English, accent twisting the words into a nonsense phrase, and he has to fight a wave of laughter.

“Not very useful in the business world, no.” He glances down at the bare space where the board sat. “What are you doing here?”

“Not much,” Atem confesses, and swings his leg over the bench to stand up. He could sit on it sideways like a normal person, but no—straddling the seat is apparently his style. “Trying to convince Maha'ad I should be permitted to study magic. I told him I can't kill anyone anymore if something goes wrong, and he said I could probably do a great deal worse than killing someone.”

Kaiba snorts. Then he pauses. “I thought the pharaoh was supposed to be learned in everything.”

“Maha'ad claims that's what advisors are for. I think he's just afraid I'll start lighting things on fire again.”

“I'd say that makes him sane.”

Atem looks not just embarrassed, but pained. He calms his face. Then he offers Kaiba a hand off the bench. It occurs to him, as he takes it, that Atem is perpetually cool—not cold, certainly not the way he'd expect a dead person to be, but not warm. 

“It's close to sunrise on your side.”

“Are you ever going to explain how I can spend the night playing senet here and wake up like I was sleeping all night, if you're going to go on saying this isn't a dream?”

Atem brushes a hand over his tunic, and the fabric tumbles down to his knees. No fabric softener in the afterlife, apparently.

“You keep asking me for answers I don't have,” Atem says. “If I were to hazard any explanation at all, I think I'd tend toward the concept that living dreamers and the dead may walk on the same plane, even though I know it leaves several important points entirely uncovered. I'm afraid that's the best I can do.”

“And that doesn't bother you? Not knowing? You don't even care?”

“I have eternity to find out, if it ever becomes so relevant I can't bear it anymore.”

“You're insane,” Kaiba says, and Atem just chuckles. “I have to get to work early, there's a conference call with the New York office I need to be on.”

“Don't let me detain you,” Atem answers. Then he pauses. “Wait.”

“Didn't you just say—what the _hell_ are you doing?”

Atem pulls his hand out of his tunic and opens it. There's a small gold amulet on a cord in his palm. Kaiba raises his eyebrows at it.

“Do I want to know where you were keeping that?”

Atem grins and yanks down on his tunic before Kaiba can stop him. There's another amulet dangling inside his sleeve, apparently attached to his collar. 

“You can do _anything_ with enough rope and motivation.”

“Right. Why are you stripping, again?”

Atem holds out the amulet. “You can bring food. I can eat it. But can you take something back? And will it function the same way if you can?”

He has a point, Kaiba thinks, and he reluctantly takes the amulet. It's not skin-warm, but it's not freezing cold, either. “What is this supposed to do?”

“It's a protection against nightmares.”

Kaiba wants to make a smart comment about why Atem would ever need such a thing, then another about how he's supposed to know if it's working when he doesn't believe in magic charms. He decides not to waste his breath.

“I'll let you know when I've got my next nightmare scheduled and we'll see what happens.” Good enough. Atem just smiles.

“Get to work, Kaiba. Try to have a better day this time.”

\-----------------------------

“ _That—will—not—be—a . . ._ ”

Kaiba keeps his keys in his hand and ignores his slippers on the way to the kitchen. He doesn't know who's out there, but—

“Mokuba?”

Mokuba jumps and looks up. “You're home!”

“Yeah,” Kaiba agrees. Mokuba's papers are spread out to every last inch of the light over the table, his backpack slung over a far chair. It occurs to Kaiba to wonder why he doesn't study at his own desk, in his own room. Then he jettisons the thought. The kitchen is a good study room for someone who can block out distractions, warm and full of light. During daytime hours, at least. “What are you doing up? It's almost midnight.”

“I was waiting for you and then I guess I sort of got carried away.” Sitting down, Mokuba still looks twelve. No—ten. Maybe younger. Kaiba pulls out the chair next to him. “It's okay, I finished everything else at cram school.”

“You need to get some sleep.”

“I'm okay,” Mokuba protests. “You didn't leave work until now, either.”

And here, Mokuba has him. He could argue that he took a nap over lunch, or that ten hours of meetings aren't the same as ten hours of school, but in the end he still stayed at work too late.

“You shouldn't pick up my bad habits. Call it a night, Mokuba.”

“But I have a chapter and a half to go!”

Kaiba reaches out and swings the book shut. “Mokuba, stop. You need to stop, and you need to go to bed. All you're doing is wearing yourself out.”

Mokuba flops on the table, head on his arms. “I'm never going to get through this stupid chapter.”

“Yes, you will. But not tonight. Get some sleep.”

Mokuba mumbles under his breath and drags himself out of his chair, then stretches, arms all the way above his head, up on his toes, tall enough Kaiba has to crane his neck to see his face and gets caught in a moment of near-total recall of somebody else, far away, in a different house a long time ago. Then he drops back and just looks like himself again, just Mokuba with broad shoulders and sharp cheekbones starting to peer out from the monkeyish limbs and baby face. “I'm not tired,” he whines, but acquiesces so far as to kiss Kaiba's cheek and amble toward the door.

“Then go make yourself tired. Turn out the lights. Put your phone on charge!” Kaiba calls after him, as he shuffles out of the kitchen. Mokuba will be out like a light as soon as he hits the pillows, and there won't be any getting him up again until morning. 

He considers going back to the door for his house slippers, then says fuck it and heads for the living room, where he grabs a book off the shelf and flops into a chair. 

He doesn't remember when he started keeping a visual journal, exactly. It was sometime after Atem—no—he was still “the other Yuugi” then, just a nameless mostly-mad spirit not so different from looking in the mirror—between The Event and Duelist Kingdom, sometime after the asshole was long dead and couldn't stare critically over his shoulder anymore. And all the paparazzi in the world could photograph every page in high-def, and never get any sense out of it. All the better.

He grabs a pencil out of the jar on the end table and flips to a clean page. He considers his workday, then starts sketching. A new Black Magician Girl, something Shinsato argued long and hard for, saying she didn't want ten-year-old girls playing a game where their main character had her clothes falling off. One of her friends in the intern program sketched out an idea for armor under the main uniform to cover the worst of the fanservice but keep the look Yuugi's deck made so iconic, and he wants to see how it'll model. Not bad, actually, he thinks. And one of the women Shinsato brought to her dev team seemed to think it had great story potential.

He finishes off the boots, ponders the whole look, then drops Shinsato's face on it. There's still no set face model for any of the playables, and she'll do as well as anyone. The original is no good. Goddess of Whim, too—he actually took a good look at the card art blown up on one wall in the tiny back room the devs were assigned and winced. Someone at I2, almost certainly not Pegasus, doesn't know _shit_ about drawing anatomy.

Kaiba's heard professional artists talk about concentrating to complete a drawing, but he finds it's better to let his mind wander. He wonders if any of his employees think he's actually capable of such a thing. Sonoda would probably go out of his mind if he could see Kaiba's journal, just one long succession of half-baked tech plans he's not actually interested in finishing and Duel Monsters sketches. To hell with what Sonoda might think. To hell with what any of them might think, really. It helps him sleep. 

He glances down at his page, thinking vaguely about face models and sprites, and nearly jumps.

The person looking back at him definitely isn't a face model. Not in the sense he means the word, at least. Full lips, gleaming half-lidded eyes, knowing smile, if he tried putting this in a game aimed at kids half the women playing it would swoon and the other half would crucify him for exposing their kids to someone who looks so much like pure sin.

“What in _hell_ are you doing?”

Gozaburo's voice is loud enough to be right in his ear, spoken from directly behind his shoulder, and he slams the book shut and drops his feet from the armrest to the floor at once. 

“Kaiba-san? Did you still require the light?”

Just the butler, absolutely nothing to set his heart pounding in his ears. He tries to slow his breathing long enough to answer. 

“Yeah. Yes. Yes, I'm staying up for awhile.”

He can feel a puzzled stare on the back of his head, but doesn't turn around. He's probably pale. He doesn't need to hear it from a man old enough to have two grown children of his own.

“I was going to retire for the evening. Is there any way I can assist you first?”

“A cup of tea. Black.”

“Very good, sir.”

He waits until he's sure the footsteps have faded well into the kitchen before he opens the book again. It's a good piece of work, and that makes it all the more frightening. With no model in front of him he still created eyes so real that any moment they might soften into a deep and kinder smile, the precise curve of a mouth pulled into a teasing grin. He can almost hear the soft, lilting chuckle that ought to be escaping from between those lips. 

_You said you wouldn't do this again._

Yes. Yes, he did, and he tears the page out of the book with only a little bit of a pang before flipping to a clean page and starting again with a few rough lines: Mokuba in the kitchen, banging his heels against his chair while he reads. 

When the butler comes back, Kaiba takes his tea and asks him to take out the trash basket without even looking at it. 

There are only two pieces of paper in it, but he doesn't want anyone picking them out later.

\--------------------------------

“Where are you going?”

Mokuba stops with his bag halfway over his shoulder. “Why?”

Kaiba hits pause and looks up from his computer monitor. “Because Portal is boring and it's been a really long time since we've gone anywhere together.”

“ _You_ think it's boring,” Mokuba scoffs, but he doesn't leave. “You want to go? Seriously?”

“We can get pizza for dinner.”

“Yeah!” Mokuba considers his bag, then slings it over the post at the end of the stairs. “I was gonna go to the park but there's an arcade that just opened up a couple blocks away from it and they've got an F-1 machine.” He looks Kaiba up and down. “Do you need to get dressed first?”

Kaiba swings his legs off the sofa. “Nah. I'm bringing back shitty pajama bottoms as the 'in' look. Everybody will be wearing it in six months.” He finds a throw pillow on the floor where he tossed them when he sat down, and lobs it at Mokuba, who laughs and catches it and throws it back. He flips his computer screen shut and heads for the stairs. 

_You're using your kid brother as a shield. Pathetic._

Kaiba squashes his inner critic. Yes, maybe it took a little too much of an outside reminder to push Mokuba higher on his priority list, but he's where he belongs now. It's true that he's trying to exhaust himself enough to not end up in that other place—last night he found himself leaning against one of the massive stelae outside the palace, and getting back without seeing anyone was a hassle—but it's a fringe benefit.

Really.

He finds jeans and a tee-shirt, considers a jacket, looks outside and jettisons the idea before slipping his glasses on. His most long-term employees wouldn't recognize him in this getup. One of the downsides of Duel Monsters going global and bringing his reputation with it: going out for anything without being stopped is almost impossible. He wouldn't care so much, but Mokuba likes being social for some ungodly reason, and he doesn't want to spend his day with his brother fielding people who want photos.

Mokuba is already out the door by the time he gets back, not quite bouncing on his toes. Kaiba tries to remember the last time he just went out with Mokuba for a day and realizes, shocked, that he can't. 

Maybe this was a good thing. A wake-up call. He has a company to run, a kid brother to raise. Nightly visits to a strange place where the dead walk aren't part of his plan.

“Niisama?”

He doesn't jump. Jumping is for people who have guilty secrets.

“Yeah?”

“You looked really far away. That's all.”

“Just trying to figure out why you'd invite me to play F-1 when you know I'm going to kick your ass,” he says, and Mokuba snickers.

“You _wish_ ,” he says. “There's this kid at school who was number one on this machine until I raced him. I'm going to kick _your_ ass.”

“Mokuba, don't swear.”

“Yeah, okay, sorry,” Mokuba says. He doesn't sound sorry at all. “It's nice outside.”

Kaiba has to concede the point. It's warm, but not horribly humid. 

There's a game shop next to the arcade, and he stops outside of it. It's not Kame. Glasses and tee-shirt or no, he'd be recognized there as soon as he spoke.

“Go grab a spot in line for the F-1,” he says. “I'll be right in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments, questions, concerns, and all other forms of words always gratefully appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, that escalated quickly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A cultural note: Kingda Ka is the tallest, and fastest, roller coaster in the world. 
> 
> Trigger warnings on this chapter for mentions of physical abuse and internalized homophobia.

“So we have a final gameplay plan, and— _please_ tell me that's concept art, oh my god.”

Kaiba jerks his head up. He doesn't remember when Sonoda finished his last update. He certainly doesn't remember Shinsato going into hers.

He definitely didn't give her permission to rubberneck on his notepad, either, but it's too late. The damage is done.

“Clinical studies have proven giving your hands something to occupy them improves concentration.” It sounds impressive. It's bullshit. He wasn't paying attention at all.

“Okay, so, not to be rude, but can I have it for the game? Please? Seriously? Like—those _eyes_ , oh my god. I suck at drawing guys' faces. That's what I've been trying to bring out in Set for _ages_ and I can't get it across at _all_.”

Kaiba doesn't dare look to see who he was drawing. Probably not Mokuba, based on Shinsato's reaction. He can only hope it isn't who he thinks. Instead he asks a question.

“Why Set?”

“Because he's chaotic neutral!” Shinsato grabs a sheet of paper and pushes it at him. “The only one in the game. You can change the whole course of gameplay depending on how you approach him. Everybody else has an agenda. Set's just in it to watch shi—uh. See what happens. God of chaos, you know, seemed like a great fit.”

Kaiba considers calling her on it. Then he decides to let it go. “Not what I meant.”

“ . . . oh.” Shinsato sits back. “What did you want to know?”

“Why you'd pick this for Set.” He steals a glance at the pad, like he's indicating it with his eyes. _Shit._

“Because—” Shinsato looks embarrassed. Kaiba doesn't look away.

“Because?”

“Because the first thing I thought when I saw it is 'I don't know if he'd be more likely to kiss me or kill me', and that's what I've been going for. That's what Set is, he's crazy beautiful. You seriously weren't drawing character art?”

“Not really.” He tears the sheet off the pad. At least it's not recognizably Yuugi; Atem has dark skin, and a gap between his front teeth, and differently-shaped eyes and braids instead of bangs and good god when did he actually notice all this? “Be my guest. I want to hear about this complete gameplay plan.”

Shinsato files the paper in her manila folder like it's made of gold. “Shifting open-world. Like, no matter what happens, you have a game path to follow, but the order you choose to do it in will change the game. That's why I was looking for a Set face, actually. Depending on which order you complete the temples in different things will happen. Same with Osiris' temple. You can learn different spells and get different items and stuff if you change the order. You still have to clear all nine temples and collect the Relics, but there are different ways to do it.”

“And you have them all planned out already?”

Shinsato shakes her head. “We're hoping to have at least a dry run of them by the end of next week. You know, doing A order produces B result to C endgame and so on. I think we might actually get done before then, but I don't want to say so because if you tell people they can relax they end up behind schedule.”

“All right, make it work,” Kaiba tells her, and glances at the clock on the wall. “It's two-thirty.”

The other devs head off, every last one of them headed for lunch. Shinsato stays to put things in her folder, organizing them as she goes.

“Where's your laptop?”

“Ah,” she says, and turns bright red. “I'm still reformatting it.” 

Kaiba pauses in the middle of picking up his pad. “Reformatting it.”

“It, well, I think, I'm not sure really, but the first time I turned it on it bluescreened as soon as I put in my ID? And I tried running an external diagnostic on it but nothing came up so I'm pretty sure it's not a virus but I can't get it past the login screen, so I opened it up and all the hardware _looks_ okay so I'm running a reformat and if that doesn't work I'm going to go to tech support and see if maybe the hard drive is fried or something.”

“Why didn't you take it to tech support in the first place?”

“Because if it was something I could've fixed I'd feel really stupid.”

Kaiba hides a sigh. It's too early in the day for this shit.

“Take it to tech support. Or ask Sonoda why he gave you a computer that's on bluescreen. He should know what state his equipment is in. You need to start using Aspiration. There's a reason we have a computer program for game design.”

Shinsato bows over her folder and heads out, then pauses just inside the door.

“Kaiba-san?”

Kaiba raises his eyebrows at her back, and she turns to look at him.

“That drawing. I swear it's somebody I've seen before.”

“Not likely.”

“But it _is_ actually someone you know, isn't it?”

Kaiba considers telling her it's none of her business, or not answering her at all, or lying. But—

“Yes.”

“Do you have pictures?”

“Shinsato, don't push your luck.”

The smile she offers up somehow manages to be simultaneously sheepish and not apologetic at all. It's a very Atem kind of expression, he thinks, and then wants to throw something. Nothing about this is helping his workday.

“Sorry.”

“Go to lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looks around the empty room, then down at his notepad. He can still see the faint curve of a neck, the tip of a nose.

He's going to have to start using a tablet for notes.

\----------------

He can't actually hear them from where he's standing.

He can only see them, but that's enough.

_Did you think he didn't have a life back then? That there was nothing until you came into it?_

And if he's being perfectly honest, if only with himself: yes. Yes, part of him did.

But there's Atem, his hands held out in front of him, eyes squeezed shut and lips parted, and behind him a tall man with deep black skin and long brown hair tied back with a leather thong who has one hand under Atem's elbow and the other around his waist, and even at a distance Kaiba can recognize his face.

_You're the Black Magician. Whoever you were before, that's who you are now._

He heads for the small group in the courtyard anyway—Atem, and the magician, and a girl who looks like she might be his daughter. Walking away is cowardice, and he won't indulge in it.

The tall man shifts, then lets out the kind of groan Kaiba recognizes from reading budget reports. “Atem, you're going to fidget me into my grave, can you _please_ —”

“You're already in your grave!” Atem drops his hands. “This isn't working.”

“You're not concentrating, and you have, for once in your life—”

“—I think you mean _after_ life—”

“—to stop being overly-delighted you're properly dead and hold _still_.”

Atem bursts into a fit of laughter hard enough he nearly doubles over, and the hand under his elbow claps over his chest before he can knock them both over with the force of his own merriment. The girl grins wolfishly.

“He'll sit on you if you don't stop, Atem, don't think he won't,” she says, the glee in her voice bubbling through her warning words. Atem struggles to control his face, and finally brings it back to a blank mask.

“All right, all right, I'm still, I'm still. Don't break my legs.”

The Magician lets go of his waist and starts poking at Atem's body—pushing a hip, twisting his shoulders, raising his chin with one hand. 

“I'd think you'd be better at posture than this,” he scolds, and there's no mistaking the tone. It's scolding, almost parental. “Didn't you have to practice?”

“Boring,” Atem whines, and the tall man shakes his head. 

“Arms up. Let's try again.”

Atem squeezes his eyes shut again. The Magician puts a hand back under his elbow and straightens it, then ticks his tongue in disapproval.

“ _Relax_ ,” he chides. “You're not going to get anywhere this way.”

“Think about something nice,” the girl advises him. “That's what I do.”

Atem's face relaxes. Kaiba stops in the door to the courtyard. This isn't some kind of courtship. He doesn't think. Whatever it is, stepping in could leave all of them in serious pain; he's been in enough dev meetings and test rooms to know those expressions. 

“Now say it,” the Magician counsels, and Atem's brow furrows for just a moment before he speaks again. It's not Egyptian; Kaiba doesn't understand a single word. There's a slow, soft patter, and then he sees the dust around Atem's feet turn dark. Atem's eyes shoot open, face transformed with pure delight.

“Water!”

He spins toward the girl and shows her his hands.

_He's doing magic._

Ridiculous. Stupid. And yet—

_There was no water there before. If there had been it would have been leaking out through his fingers. And that's more than he could hold in his hands without a bowl, which you'd be able to see._

He finishes the turn toward the courtyard entrance, apparently intending to tear off to somewhere else, and then stops short.

“Kaiba.”

“Atem.”

Atem drops his hands. Kaiba watches the drops of water splatter over Atem's feet. 

“I didn't think you were coming back.”

“I've had work.”

“Yes, of course,” Atem answers. There's a moment of awkward silence, and then the Magician walks past Kaiba and back into the palace. _Stalks_ past him, more accurately, he thinks; there's a single glance from one dark eye, and then he's gone.

“I think your boyfriend just threatened to slit my throat with his cheekbones.”

Atem and the brown-haired girl both double over in laughter. Kaiba waits for one of them to let him in on the joke. It doesn't seem to be forthcoming.

“I'll leave you to it then.”

There's a brush of fingers on his wrist, and he stops. Atem is still snickering, but he's trying to wrestle his face back to neutral. Then the girl catches his eye, and he's off again.

“My _boyfriend_ ,” he manages, and the snickers devolve into actual giggles. Kaiba just stares at him. Clearly he needs to get back on the dueling circuit. His stop-your-bullshit glare is weakening. “My _boyfriend_ , bless the Nile.” 

The girl passes him a piece of cloth, and he wipes his eyes with it. “Maha'ad is a natural eunuch, and nobody's partner,” he says. “The only lust I've ever seen in his face was the first time he set foot in the royal library. And if he wanted to slit your throat, you'd be dead already.” He lets out another little wrung-out laugh. “My boyfriend. Ubasti save me.”

The girl is still giggling, and Kaiba is starting to be pissed off. Atem shakes his head, and finally manages to contain himself. “I assume you haven't returned just to pass judgment on my friends.”

“I still have a senet challenge to beat you at.”

“Indeed,” Atem comments, and the girl ducks under Atem's arm, apparently headed for the courtyard entrance. “Mana. This is the friend of mine I told you about.”

Mana stops, looks up at him, and then bows, deeply, an obvious imitation of something she learned from Atem, who learned it from Yuugi, who still doesn't know how to do it properly. He should probably be insulted. Instead he bows back, and when she darts under his arm and runs down the corridor into the main palace he doesn't bother glaring at her.

“Friend of yours?”

“They're both friends of mine.” Atem nods him toward the bench in the courtyard, senet board already set on it. The light pieces are all off the board. Kaiba wonders if that was the cost for the magic lesson he walked into—I win, you teach. “Maha'ad has been the twin of my heart since I was a child. Mana is his apprentice.” He sets up the board, then glances up through golden braids at Kaiba's face. “You don't know them at all?”

“He was the Black Magician. And the one you were tormenting the last time I was here by running around with half your clothes off.”

“Yes,” Atem agrees. “The most powerful mage in a millennium. Natural, not book-taught, and more formal than he really should be. But that's all?”

“Should there be something else? It's your turn.”

“I'd tell you, but you'd think I was making fun of you.”

“Is this about the bullshit the Ishtar woman was going on about? Past lives and destiny and whatever?”

Atem is silent until Kaiba finally meets his eyes—two dark embers in an even mahogany face, he could be a painted image in his own tomb.

“Yes.”

Kaiba snorts and rolls the D16. He wonders what the Magician—what did Atem call him. Maha'ad—made of it. 

“Bullshit.”

“Call it that if you like,” Atem agrees. “But here you sit, with someone you've acknowledged is a spirit, in a place you're perfectly aware no longer exists, and you haven't questioned that.”

“I have nothing _but_ questions. I'm here for answers.”

“Yes, somehow I thought you might say that.” There's silence, and the click of Atem moving a piece off the board. “Is everything all right at work?”

“Should it not be?”

“When a man makes a habit of visiting every day or two, and then disappears for six, I assume something pressing is in the works.”

“I didn't know I was under an obligation to entertain your royal majesty every night.”

Atem's mouth twitches upward, and he swaps out one of Kaiba's pawns. _Damn it all._

“I thought you said you were going to take a nap this afternoon.”

Kaiba doesn't even need to turn around. He's heard the voice once before, and once was enough. Atem looks up over his shoulder and grins.

“Yes, but supposedly I'm having my ass kicked this afternoon—”

“—your _language_ —”

“—and as he's come all the way here I thought—”

“— _especially_ in front of a guest—”

“—I shouldn't be so crass as to dismiss him.” Atem's grin goes from glad to wolfish. “After all, some royal decorum is needed, isn't it?”

Kaiba looks down and studies the board. It's a terrible joke, and he's not going to laugh. He's _not_. 

_You are so fucked._

“ _Atem_ ,” Maha'ad says, his voice slightly pained, and Atem snickers before holding up his arms. 

He's also not going to stare, _definitely_ not, but—

“Thought you said he wasn't your boyfriend.”

Both of them look bewildered. Then Atem breaks into laughter again.

“This isn't Domino, Kaiba. It's normal to kiss your friends here.”

“Mm.” Atem has four separate pawns lined up for House of Life again, damn him and this game. Kaiba glances up from the board. “Should I be offended?”

And then Atem leans across the board, and his stomach does the same thing it did the only time he ever let Mokuba drag him onto the Kingda Ka, and Atem, _fuck_ him, is grinning, because Kaiba almost certainly looks like a wide-eyed idiot.

“No.”

_Answer him, damn you!_

“Glad we've got that settled.” He's reasonably sure his voice is steady. Reasonably. Mostly. Maha'ad is staring down at him, and he's still not convinced it's with goodwill. 

“My roll again,” Atem comments. “And a second House of Life, and I think . . . well, that went quickly.” He looks up, wry grin still spread across his face. “Rematch?”

“My lunch hour is only so long.” And he shouldn't have napped through it. He _really_ shouldn't have napped through it today.

“Another time, then,” Atem says. “Tend your business. Don't stay away so long this time.”

“Right.”

He doesn't look over his shoulder on his way out of the courtyard. He doesn't dare. 

He still doesn't know where this place is, or how he comes here, or what Atem did to spill clear fresh water across the courtyard, but he's sure of one thing:

That press of lips across the senet board was no friend's kiss.

\-------------------------

“Hey! Ow!”

He blinks twice, once to clear the sleep out of his eyes and once against the sudden flash of light from his bedside lamp, and looks up. There's a red scratch across Mokuba's cheek, and the guilt is sudden and crushing.

_You shouldn't reach for people when your eyes are closed, asshole. You clawed him._

Mokuba's eyes flit to the end of the bed, and then he reaches out and yanks the bedcovers. Kaiba falls the rest of the way to the floor with a muffled thump. Mokuba flops down next to him on a pair of toppled pillows.

“You were screaming.”

Kaiba pulls him into a hug. It's awkward, Mokuba crosslegged and Kaiba still tangled in his sheets, and probably too tight, but if Mokuba's chin is over his shoulder he doesn't have to look at that accusing red mark. 

“Just nightmares. You okay?”

Mokuba tries to snuggle into his arms the way he did when they were four and nine and alone. Back then he didn't have elbows nearly so pointy or disproportionately big feet to deal with, but Kaiba appreciates the effort, and manages to shove the sheets down enough to make room. “I'm fine. You just kind of startled me is all. I forgot you wake up that fast. Why are you crying?”

“I'm not crying.”

“If you're not crying then you're drooling and I really hope you're not drooling on my shoulder 'cause that'd be gross.”

Kaiba pulls away, but not far—just enough to swipe a hand across his eyes. “Fine, you caught me. Hey—”

Mokuba makes a face at him and goes back to trying to dry his face. His tee-shirt is too tight, and he's having trouble getting enough hem to do anything constructive with. The shirt is almost brand-new. Kaiba's sure it's not more than two months old, but Mokuba was three inches shorter then. “What was the nightmare about?”

“Don't worry about it. You should get back to bed, you've got school tomorrow.”

Mokuba makes his best I-am-not-impressed-at-all-Seto face. It's hampered by bedhead and pre-growth spurt baby cheeks, but he tries. “Come on, tell me.”

“Something that happened a long time ago. It doesn't matter.”

“Niisama, you fell out of _bed_.”

“How's that bruise from falling off your skateboard?”

“Not the same thing.” Mokuba still hasn't looked away. It's starting to feel unsettling. Kaiba doesn't remember him ever managing to look so serious without breaking into giggles. 

“I had a dream about the asshole burning you, and I couldn't get to you to stop him. I told you before I'd never let it happen again. It's just a bad night. That's all.”

Mokuba stares, mouth open, eyes wide. Then his whole face breaks into a grin that probably wouldn't look so fiendish if the shadows from the lamp were the other way.

“Ooooh, you _like_ somebody!”

“ . . . what?”

The grin fades, and Mokuba wraps his arms around Kaiba's neck again. “I remember when that happened,” he says, and he must be telling the truth, because he doesn't squirm when Kaiba squeezes him. “He was calling you names and when I asked one of the maids what they meant she wouldn't tell me so I used the computer while he was at work. That was when I asked you how to clear a search history, remember? I know why you're dreaming about it again. Because he said if you ever felt like being that stupid again you should remember what you'd be doing to me.” Mokuba sits back. On the floor, they're close to equal in height. “But he's dead, niisama. He's dead and he was wrong, and we're still here.” The grin breaks out again. “Is it Shinsato? It's Shinsato, isn't it?”

“Oh my god, you're incorrigible,” Kaiba says, and pushes Mokuba's shoulder. He topples off his pillows with an undignified squawk. “No, it's not Shinsato. It's nobody.”

Mokuba finally rights himself. He's trying for the serious face again. “Fine, don't tell me. Go for it anyway.” The serious face breaks into giggles. Relief. “But if you're telling the truth and it's _not_ Shinsato, maybe you should stop hanging out in R &D so much.”

“I really don't think he cares.” He feels his stomach turn. This is why he hates late-night conversations. _Shit!_

“Oh. Well, maybe you should stop hanging out in R&D so you have more time to talk to him, then, if you think he's that worth it. Here.” Mokuba clambers off the pillows and flings himself onto the mattress, then crawls into the middle. “I'll stay with you. Then if you have nightmares again, when you wake up I'll be here and you'll know it's okay.”

He should send Mokuba back to his own room. They're really getting too old for sleepovers, both of them. But he's also not sure his voice won't shake, and finally he just pulls himself to his feet and reaches for his glasses.

“Go ahead. I'm going to go get a cup of tea.” 

_He didn't even blink. It's fine._

_It's not fine._

_Then stop talking to him._

_I don't want to._

_Then take your brother's advice, and say something._

_I don't want to do that either._

He pauses in front of the hot water tap. Then he heads for the fridge. Nobody else is around to see him chugging a glass of milk like a little kid, and if he doesn't sleep before work he's going to be useless.

He puts the glass in the sink, runs enough water to keep it from filming over, heads back up the stairs. He wonders if he should find the scarab necklace in his bedside drawer and put it on, then jettisons the idea. If it falls out of his shirt in the night Mokuba will notice, and ask questions he's not prepared to answer. 

Instead he finds Mokuba's hand under the pillow and lays on his side, face to face, the way they used to in a much smaller bed in a much bigger room with significantly more people in it. Back then Mokuba was the one who needed his hand held, and it feels vaguely shameful for it to be the other way around, but if there's anybody he can count on to not say a word it's his kid brother. 

He closes his eyes. _Is it Shinsato,_ he thinks, and almost snorts laughter before realizing it would make him a terrible bedmate only a few minutes after Mokuba's fallen asleep. 

_No. That would almost be normal._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions? Comments? Concerns? Screams of delight or anguish? Leave them below!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaiba has Feelings. He _hates_ having Feelings.

“You know, Niisama, I think the only good thing about board meetings is I get out of school early.”

“If I were you, I think I'd rather take the school day,” Kaiba comments, and swipes his keycard. The elevator beeps, and Mokuba pulls his key out from under his shirt. One of these days Kaiba has to get him a real keychain. “At least in school if you really can't take it anymore you can always say you have to go to the bathroom.”

Mokuba snickers. “Yeah, but you'd _never_ do that, right?”

“Of course not. I need to be a good role model for my kid brother.”

The snickers break into a sudden soprano giggle, then cut off, and Kaiba bites the inside of his lip before he can laugh right in Mokuba's face. And he has to go through a board meeting like this. Poor kid.

They're most of the way down the hall when Kaiba doubles back. “Shinsato.”

He hears a ruffle of papers, and a curse he chooses to go situationally deaf for, and then the shushing of a large pile of paperwork being scooped together.

“Didn't I tell you to get on Aspiration?”

“Sorry, sorry . . . ” She steps back into his line of vision, arms full of papers. “I am. I was just scanning stuff so I can get it in project folders. There's a ton. And Sonoda asked if I could run some scans for him too. I'll sort everything before I take it back, I just—”

“So your computer is fixed.”

Shinsato reaches up with her free arm and pushes her bangs out of her face. Her braid is falling apart in long and messy wisps, and he wonders just how fast she was trying to work the scanner. Her hair is long enough she might've gotten caught in it a couple of times. “Well, no. Tech support said it was dead. The whole motherboard was fried and the hard drive was like—it was _blank_ or something. But they got me set up with a replacement, so I've got one that works now.”

“Did your team get a room assigned yet?”

“Yeah, we have one of the old coding labs on the tenth floor. There's corkboard walls and everything. Thank you.”

Kaiba doesn't actually let his frown show, but he still makes a mental note to find out why a team of twenty people is being asked to work in a room equipped for six. “I want to see those dry runs fleshed out by next Thursday. You've got the space and the equipment now.”

“Oh, that's not a problem,” she says, and shrugs her pile of papers further into her arm before brushing her hair out of her face again. “We've only got two left to go.”

“Good. Then let's see it.” He turns and walks off, wondering just how many of those scans are Sonoda's and why he's not sending an intern without their own project to take care of it.

“You just wanted an excuse to talk to her,” Mokuba singsongs. Kaiba rolls his eyes.

“Tell anybody I said this and I'll hang you off the roof, but no. I keep forgetting she's not blonde and I didn't realize it was her until she was almost back to the elevator.”

Mokuba breaks out in laughter. “Her hair is _white_ , Niisama, how can you _forget_?”

“Because it's not like I've paid a lot of attention, white hair, green eyes, there are people all over Domino who—”

“Her eyes are blue,” Mokuba protests. Then the corners of his mouth twist up. Oh no. “Hey, Niisama?”

“Yeah?”

“What hexadecimal color are Yuugi's eyes exactly?”

“Oh, you're an _ass_ ,” Kaiba tells him, but without any real heat in it, and Mokuba starts giggling.

“I should've figured this out _years_ ago,” Mokuba comments, and stretches his arms over his head. “I bet that's who you're talking to, isn't it.”

“It's not Yuugi,” Kaiba says. “I'm not telling you who it is.”

Mokuba eyes him. “Is it Isono?”

“Is it—oh my _god_.” Kaiba stops walking and puts his hands over his eyes. “ _No_. What the _fuck_ , Mokuba, that's—I am going to invent a time machine and I am going to personally come back to thirty seconds ago to warp you into one of these side rooms so you _never say that_.”

“Is it—”

“I'm not telling you. _Ever_. Consider it revenge for assaulting my brain.” He pauses outside the boardroom door. “Hey, Mokuba?”

“Yeah?” Mokuba looks up at him. Not nearly as far up as he used to.

“Keep this between us for now, okay?”

“Yeah, I figured.” Mokuba smiles, and for half a second Kaiba actually sees himself, and someone else, mirrored back in his brother's face. “You're good with me.”

\-------------------------

“I know what you were doing.”

“I was entirely serious. It's not my fault you chose to focus on mythology instead of social customs.”

“After that.”

“Ah.” Atem doesn't smile, exactly, but the expression in his eyes changes. “And what is it you know I was doing?”

He doesn't bother answering. Instead he pushes Atem up against the warm rough stone of the palace archway, pulls him up by the hips when Atem tries to hook an arm around his neck to pull him down, feels Atem abruptly take in a breath jagged with excitement and lack of use. 

“This.”

Atem wastes a good two seconds scrabbling to decide how he wants to hold on instead of kissing back. Kaiba finally slides a hand behind his shoulders to steady him, feels Atem's own hand skim down his chest and then takes in a sharp breath of his own against Atem's lips when those nimble dark fingers do something that ought to be prohibited by international law as an act of war against Kaiba's sanity, or at least his better judgment. 

And then he sits up, breathless and Atemless, with rain rattling the windows. 

_Fuck._

He tries splashing his face in the bathroom. All it does is wake him up and piss him off when he realizes how flushed he is. It's the first time in his entire life he's wished Mokuba wasn't in the house; all he really wants is to strip off his tee-shirt and go get a glass of water, but Mokuba has a habit of waking up in the middle of the night and meandering before he goes back to bed, and the last thing Kaiba wants is a heartfelt conversation about his scars at three in the morning. 

_You know what? Fuck it._

He pulls off the shirt and tosses it at his hamper. It's damp and wrinkled and useless anyway. He's going to have to change before he goes back to bed.

 _If_ he goes back to bed, with the memory of Atem's heated eyes dancing directly behind his own. He's not sure he could sleep. He's not sure he wants to.

He's still sitting at the kitchen island, a glass of water in front of him and the door onto the covered back porch open to let in the air, when Mokuba pads downstairs and pours a glass of milk. He pulls up a stool next to the island, and Kaiba braces himself. 

_Please don't ask me what I'm doing down here._

Mokuba pulls himself onto the stool and sips his milk. Kaiba almost thinks he's going to get away clean when the corners of Mokuba's mouth twist up in that mischievous grin that bodes ill for anyone it's aimed at.

“New necklace?”

“Huh?” He looks down. Yes, he's stopped wearing his locket, preferring the relative security of keeping it in an inside coat pocket after he nearly lost it in a helicopter updraft, but—

_Fuck!_

He closes his hand around the scarab before Mokuba can identify it. “No.”

The grin grows. “Oooh, did you get that from that _guy_?”

“No.”

“Can I see it?”

“ _No_ , Mokuba. Finish your milk.”

“I'll tell Shinsato it's a button off Jyonouchi's school uniform.”

“You do that. She doesn't even know who he is.” Kaiba pauses. “Didn't he graduate? Or did the mutt get held back a year?”

“He graduated,” Mokuba sighs, and drains his milk. “I'm gonna go read.”

“Use the—”

“The incandescent bulb, I know, I know, blue light keeps you awake.” 

Mokuba hops off his stool. It must be a night for first time complicated emotions, because Kaiba doesn't remember ever feeling envious of his kid brother before. Mokuba is thirteen, and managed to survive both Gozaburo's grooming and Kaiba's own early attempts at wearing him down; he falls in and out of love with the entire world on a daily basis, and he's perfectly happy doing it.

If Mokuba were the one with a gold amulet around his neck, he'd probably be absolutely giddy. He definitely wouldn't be panicking over a glass of water in the kitchen.

“Night, Niisama,” he chirps, and then he's down the hall into the den, where he's probably going to curl up over Harry Potter until he's sleepy enough to go back to bed. Kaiba considers the rest of his water, then pours it down the sink.

He has to sleep. He has to at least try.

But first he takes off the scarab necklace, and tosses it in his nightstand. Nightstand, hell. He should throw it in the trash. 

He has a better idea for it.

\---------------------------------------

“I want to know what this thing is.”

Atem looks bewildered. “What?”

Kaiba holds up the amulet. It's hanging from a regular chain now, not the kind of giant thing that held up the Millennium Puzzle but fine gold link. It glimmers in the moonlight. “You told me this was for nightmares.”

“It is. Not the strongest one I have, but that one I won't give away. It was given to me by my mother. The one in your hands is—” Atem frowns. “I suppose you might call it a practice piece. Maha'ad used them to improve his concentration.”

“I want to know why you gave it to me.”

“Because it was the first thing I had available that I thought might travel with you easily. I thought that was clear.”

Atem no longer looks bewildered. Atem looks—not quite pissed, but getting there. Kaiba feels his own expression shift to match. Either Atem is lying, or Atem isn't being wholly truthful, and either way Kaiba's had enough.

“I want to know what it _really_ is.”

“I've already told you. It wards away nightmares. It's an amulet, Kaiba, not a trap card. It has one function. Two, if you appreciate it aesthetically, I suppose.”

_Don't do it._

_I don't care._

What he means to do is shake Atem's shoulder, maybe yank him closer by his collar just to emphasize that he intends to get answers, and intends to get them now. 

Instead Atem bends one knee, and shoots out a single hand to encompass Kaiba's wrist, and pivots, and suddenly Kaiba is on his back on the ground, Atem crouching over him. His voice is soft. It doesn't need to be raised to be terrifying.

“I allowed you to lay hands on me once because you were frightened,” Atem says. Kaiba can trace the shape of the words on his lips, gilded by moonlight. “I won't allow it again. This is your only warning, Kaiba. Make no mistake, a third time will find the doors to this world closed to you, and they won't open again.”

_He flipped me. The tiny son of a bitch literally used my own height as a weapon._

He probably shouldn't admire that ability.

“I understand.”

Atem shifts to one knee and holds out a hand. 

He probably also shouldn't accept an offer of help from a man who just slammed him to the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of his body, but to hell with what he shouldn't do, and he lets Atem pull him up to sitting. The gold chain feels like grit sand between their palms.

“It's always possible the amulet I gave you wasn't properly finished,” Atem says. “I wasn't joking when I said Maha'ad enchanted them for practice. But I wouldn't intentionally put something harmful in your hands, and I have every reason to believe Maha'ad would say the same of me. And he'd know better than I whether it's safe.”

“I shouldn't have grabbed you.”

If Atem's eyes opened any wider, Kaiba thinks, they might fall right out of his head. In all the time Kaiba's known him he's never seen him rendered completely speechless. But whether he likes to admit it or not, he knows it's true: Atem has never lied to him. Not on purpose, at least. Beating the shit out of people for giving undesirable answers is a tactic he learned from someone else, one he'd rather forget. 

“I should let you have this back.” He untangles his fingers from the chain, and then Atem's hand pushes the amulet back into his palm, makes his fingers close over it.

“Keep it. You may find a use for it.”

_You know what you could do._

_No._

Atem stands up, the moment broken. He holds out a hand. Kaiba debates whether or not he should take it. Then he pretends he didn't see it, and boosts himself to his feet. 

“I didn't know bodyslamming was part of palace training.”

Atem's smile is just a little too wry to be innocent. “You'd be amazed at some of the things I know.”

Kaiba's sure he would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments, concerns, criticism, questions, meta? Leave them below!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaiba has a life, and it's complicated, now featuring further complications.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, kinderlach!
> 
>  
> 
> I come with notes! In the first segment, you'll want to know that lines of dialogue in italics are in English, while lines in bold are in Japanese. Regular text should be read as Egyptian.
> 
>  
> 
> I CONTINUE TO THANK EVERYONE FOR THEIR COMMENTS. AND ART. DID YOU GUYS SEE SOMEONE DREW A PIECE OF ART FOR CHAPTER THREE IT'S SO ADORABLE GO LOOK AT IT https://ibb.co/bS403v
> 
>  
> 
> _Tell me who you are_  
>  _Your father has forsaken you_  
>  _Left you with those scars_  
>  _My hope is that you'll make it through_  
>  _Hate must never win_  
>  _Even when we're worlds apart_  
>  _Your love is not a sin_
> 
>  
> 
> \--"Coming Home," Falling in Reverse

_No._

He's pretty sure he's in Atem's world. He thinks.

He can't see, but there's water up to his knees, so he probably ended up in the Nile.

Far off in one direction is a streak of light. It's probably actually a lamp of some kind with perfectly normal fire in it, but when he tries to look at it all he sees is throbbing red and purple in time with the beat of his heart. He heads for it anyway, legs splayed out, one heavy foot at a time, like he's drunk. Or dying.

Dying sounds good, actually, assuming dead people don't have migraines.

The water around his legs gets shallower. He takes two deep breaths, feels them lance through his head like spears, and takes another step. There's mud under his bare feet, and then sand, and—

He doesn't actually make it to the shore before everything in his stomach comes up, but he lands with his hands out of the water and his body hopefully not in his own vomit, so at least he's not drowning. He pulls himself to one knee, then to his feet, and staggers a few more steps before his legs give out beneath him again. The world rocks and sways. His head and hands feel like they're made of glass.

Maybe he _is_ dying. Maybe it's an aneurysm. He raises his head enough to spit and tastes bile. He tries to trace the course of actions that would have left him with a headache of this magnitude, but every thought is a pulse like a knife, and he gives up.

There's sand digging into his hands, and when he goes down again he tries to keep his head on his arm. Then he just lays still and tries to breathe. He'll try again. In a minute. Just a minute. Two.

He doesn't know how long he's been there when he hears a sudden surprised curse, and running that slams into his head like stereo speakers at top volume. There's a skid, and in it he can hear the tiny glasslike _scree_ of every grain of sand before the runner gets to one knee beside him.

“Kaiba?”

It's Atem's voice, and he'd wonder what Atem is doing out here in the middle of the night if he didn't know Kaiba was coming, but more importantly he can't let himself be seen laying like a dead fish on the banks of the Nile. He _can't_ , and he manages to drag himself all the way to one knee before his legs start to shake. 

“Don't try to stand,” Atem says. “You're out of the water. I thought I felt you, so I came.”

Kaiba tries to say _leave me alone_. He tries to say _I'm fine_. What comes out is a slurred mess, and he collapses against Atem's arm. There's a fast tread, and then someone calls Atem's name and starts running. 

“He's hurt. Or sick. He tried to say something to me and it all came out gibberish.” 

Atem sounds like a child asking to keep a lost puppy, and Kaiba tries to sit up again. He's doing just fine until he tries to open his eyes, and then the world flips upside down and he's back against Atem's shoulder. There's a sigh from the second voice.

“All right,” the voice says, and finally Kaiba can place it: Maha'ad. “Make yourself useful. Hold this. Keep it up, I only have two hands.”

Atem's shoulder shifts, and then Kaiba feels a pair of rough fingers much larger than Atem's under his shirt collar. “Open your eyes.”

He tries—let nobody say he won't try anything, even if it kills him—but there's a light less than a foot from his face, and even though it's pale it makes him want to vomit again, and he squeezes his eyes shut against a new wave of pain. Maha'ad runs a single finger over his eye and opens it.

“It's not a disturbance in the brain,” he comments. “His face is moving just fine. His eyes are dark, though.” There's a frown in his voice. “Kaiba. Do you understand me?”

“ _Yes._ ” He's not sure he makes sense, but he can understand perfectly. Atem's free arm steadies his shoulder.

“I told you. He's speaking English.”

“But it's intelligible?”

“I know it's an English word. I don't know how to speak the language.”

Maha'ad curses under his breath. Then those rough fingers trace over Kaiba's wrist, stop on the pulse point, rest there.

“I don't remember the finer points of this.” The frown is more prominent than ever. “But I think his heart is fast. You understand his language. Ask him—” A flurry of syllables he can't understand. To hell with his face. Maybe it is a stroke.

“ **When you open your eyes, do you see colors that shouldn't be there?** ”

“ **Auras. Yes.** ”

“Often enough he has a word for it,” Atem comments, and Kaiba hears a sigh of relief.

“I know how to treat this.”

“What is it?”

“Headache.”

“ _Bullshit_ ,” Atem says, and Kaiba reflects that he hasn't heard Atem swear that way since he started coming here. There's a small series of glassy sounds, and he winces: Maha'ad, standing up and disturbing the sand.

“Your mother used to have these. She called them 'small deaths.' It's no ordinary headache.”

Kaiba tries to force his brain straight. “ **I have medication at home.** ”

“But you didn't take it?”

“ **I was at work.** ” And a nineteen-hour workday with no glasses on is probably the reason he's here in the first place, but that's irrelevant.

“Maha'ad has something for it.” There's a pause. “It's a _headache_?”

“ **Migraine.** Like—” He tries to come up with a reasonable metaphor Atem might actually understand, even while his head throbs like a drumbeat. “If an ordinary headache is one star. A migraine is the known universe.” He turns his head and forces himself off Atem's arm. He's pretty sure he squeezed Atem's leg too hard in the process, but he's dizzy, and when he vomits again he's dizzier still. Atem wraps an arm around his chest and cups his free hand against Kaiba's chin.

“Drink this.”

Kaiba wants to protest, but more than that he wants to wash away the taste of illness, and the water in Atem's hand is cold against his burning skin. Not Nile water. Not going to make him sicker. Probably.

There's a low _snick_ sound, and a shirr of fabric, and a pause; then something soft and damp and delightfully cool brushes his neck. Probably part of Atem's kilt, unless he's developed the ability to materialize extra fabric at will. If he weren't still in enough pain to lie passively on Atem's shoulder and not protest, he'd bolt at the idea of what that entails.

Instead he lets Atem hold him in place, washing his face and neck with his handful of wet fabric, occasionally shifting it to a cooler patch. He feels less like glass, still hot but not about to shatter. 

There's another small _scree_ , and he winces. It's not Atem, but he's heard no other footsteps, and—

_Oh._

He has no idea what kind of ointment or substance Maha'ad just smeared across his forehead, but in its wake he can feel the pain in his head subsiding. That there's still a headache is beyond doubt, but he can open his eyes, and when he looks up at the light by his face the auras are gone.

And then it hits him: he's literally lying in Atem's lap.

He rolls to the side and tries to make his feet. Instead he slides in the sand, and then he sees Maha'ad approach in the thin light from—

_What's in his hand?_

It's not a lantern, not a torch. The light is cool and blue, not hot and red. He's busy staring at it when the world tilts and he nearly falls— _would_ fall, if not for a single dark arm around his waist.

“Atem?” Maha'ad's voice, not so much a question as a paragraph-long statement in a single word. There's no shrill glassy scraping when Atem gets to his feet this time—just the dull crunch of sand.

“I'll go with him.”

“Do you know where you're going?”

“In general. Particulars shouldn't be hard.” There's a pause. “Can I breathe, on that side?”

“You won't need to.”

“Then there's no problem,” Atem declares, and throws an overenthusiastic arm around Kaiba's waist.

“Wait, go with me where?”

“Back to your own world,” Atem says, and Kaiba wants to protest, but as soon as he takes a step to pull away the whole world tilts sideways again, and it seems like a terrible idea. “When I first found you I thought you were dying. Khemet is eternal, there's no need to hurry it along letting you go back alone.”

Maha'ad lets go, and the arm around Kaiba's waist tightens. Because otherwise he might slither down through Atem's grip and hit the ground, or at least his knees. 

“I'll be fine.”

He can't actually see the _Look_ Atem is giving him, but he can feel it, and then he's lying down instead of standing up and there's a sofa under him. _His_ sofa, in the second office, and thank whoever he's down here, really, because the light from the cityglow aboveground might actually kill him, or at least destroy his tentative truce with his head.

His head also isn't on his arm, and he's about to push himself up on one hand to see what the hell is going on when he feels a single hand on his arm, pushing him back onto the sofa.

“Stay. Rest. I'll guard you.”

He wants to say _I don't need a guard._ He wants to say _go back._ He wants to point out that if Mokuba comes to see if he's here, or Isono, he's going to have an extremely hard time explaining why he's lying down with his head in the lap of a highly ineffectual half-dressed Mutou Yuugi cosplayer in the second office nobody is supposed to know about.

Instead he closes his eyes, and sleeps.

\-------------------------

“I'm not asking your blessing. I'm not even asking your approval. I only want your understanding.”

Kaiba wonders if he should walk away. It doesn't sound like the kind of conversation he should be walking in on. Then he wonders when he started to care about things like tact and walking in on other people.

“This I cannot grant, Iahnefer. You have a duty to the throne—”

“I've done my duty!” Atem's voice, raised in a kind of anger Kaiba's never heard from his mouth but recognizes all too well from his own mind. “I did nothing but my duty the entire time I spent on the throne. I lived for Khemet, I died for Khemet, I walked into hell with a smile on my face knowing I might never walk out because I might save Khemet, I spent three thousand years doing my duty and all I want is a very small and basic happiness every other man in this kingdom is allowed to have!”

There's a long and ringing silence. Kaiba wonders if it's the other man's disapproval toward Atem's shouting, or if he's simply astonished at himself. At last he steps into the courtyard. 

There's only one person in it, and it's Atem, sitting on a bench with his face in his hands. Kaiba stops.

_Is he crying?_

_Fuck._

No small part of him wants to walk away. He dislikes thinking of himself as inept at anything, but emotional people are definitely on what he prefers to think of as a very, very short list.

_But you're not going to, are you. Even if you fuck things up._

_You need to get control over yourself._

Finally he walks up and puts a hand on Atem's shoulder. Atem covers it with his own. Then he jumps, and turns his head enough to see Kaiba's fingers, gasps and tries to wipe his face on his gold-covered wrist before trying again with his elbow. If there weren't smudges of kohl left behind on his skin, the whole thing would be almost comical. 

“I wasn't expecting you today.”

“I didn't know you expected me on any day in particular.”

“Well, I wouldn't set a calendar by it, but every other day or so is reasonably close. You were here yesterday, and the day before.”

“Who's Iahnefer?”

Atem's eyes, still watery, go wide enough to almost look like he hasn't been crying. “You heard—?”

“The last thirty seconds or so. I thought I might need to stop a fistfight.”

Atem shakes his head. “My father went against all advice to raise me without being struck. It's a favor I mean to always return.” He takes a deep breath, the kind Mokuba uses to pull himself together after a nightmare. “I am Iahnefer. It . . . was a custom, to prevent ill-fortune from the gods. Having a second name to deflect illness and death. It wasn't written in my tomb because its entire purpose was to be secret. I didn't even remember I had it until I came here.”

“So that's your real name?” He tries not to frown. He's only just gotten used to Atem, instead of Yuugi. Atem shakes his head.

“My _real_ name has never been spoken by anyone else, nor have I told it to anyone but the one who gave it to me. To do so would be to offer any who spoke it complete control over myself and the crown. The name you heard is a—I suppose the closest thing to it, in your time and place, would be a disguise. Atem is my informal name. The one used by my friends, not in my position as pharaoh.”

“Your nomen.”

If Atem's eyes weren't still wet, his expression would be downright comical. “Yes. You've been reading?”

“I need to know Egyptian manners so I can ignore them all deliberately.”

Atem starts laughing so loudly a pair of offended birds take off from the tree above them. He squeezes Kaiba's hand— _fuck_ —and swipes ineffectually at the tears of laughter leaking from the corners of his eyes. At last he pulls himself to his feet.

“I suppose I should find something to take him for shouting,” Atem sighs. “You wouldn't want to go pick apples with me, would you?”

“You're actually going to apologize to him for having an opinion?”

“My father is a good man.” Atem stares off across the courtyard. “It's just in this matter, we don't see eye to eye.”

_What matter?_

“I can go with you.”

The warm little glint is back in Atem's eyes, equal parts mischief and contentedness. 

_Holy shit. He stopped crying._

“Then let's go.”

\-----------------------

“Seto-sama! What luck, I needed to talk to you about—”

“I have a meeting at eleven with Shinsato and her team. She said you moved them to the tenth floor somewhere.”

Sonoda's face goes bitter, like he just got a mouthful of lemon. “Yes, of course. 1019. Have you—er—looked into assigning them a team lead?”

“They've got a team lead, as long as she doesn't screw it up.”

“Between you and me, I think I'd start looking for a replacement. Have you seen her team yet?”

“Not all of them. Something you know I don't?”

Sonoda pauses. “Maybe you'd better see for yourself.”

“I will.” And he heads for the elevator, brushing off the last call of his name down the hallway. This is what R&D meetings are for.

Room 1019 is a chaos of power strips and carefully-stacked laptops. At least two people on the team have built themselves mini-cubicles under the formica computer tables, papers and mugs and computers stashed beneath to make more room on top for files and books and calculators. The whiteboard wall is covered in a series of lists and questions; the corkboard wall is full, floor to ceiling, with maps of potential game layouts and concept art and Duel Monsters cards tagged with post-it notes about in-game use. The post-its are everywhere—on laptops, on books, on cards, on the map. A few of them dot the floor, apparently fallen from their original locations. There's a jar of change sitting on the corner of the computer table nearest the door, labeled COFFEE STUFF, and a multiport phone charger next to it. Kaiba plugs in his phone, idly wondering if it's there for inspiration or function, and watches the charge bar light up green. 

“—at eleven, but maybe we can catch lunch later! Ow!”

“This is why we face forward when we're entering rooms,” Kaiba says. It's not his fault his arm was at face-level. Shinsato pushes her bangs out of her face.

“Sorry, Kogane-san had a question about the—oh, it's you!”

“Yes,” he agrees. “You said you have your gameplay outline ready.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we have it all in Aspiration, but we've been working on a paper map so we can, you know, move stuff around and brainstorm, instead of everybody doing their own thing and then having to put that together. I don't know if there's actually a conference mode in Aspiration, but if there is none of us could find it.” 

There isn't. Damn it. Shinsato plugs in her phone and drops an armload of books on the computer table before reaching under it and pulling out a sealed coffee mug. The makeshift station by the door must be hers. She takes a sip, makes a face, and sets the cup back down. “That is _not_ mine. Do you want me to pull out the computer or is the wall map okay?”

“The wall map will do.”

Shinsato crosses the room without looking down once. Kaiba tries to pretend he's not all but staring at his feet as he makes his way through the forest of electrical cords, equipment, and other people's belongings. Shinsato pulls down on a sheet of paper in a page protector attached to a length of twine pinned to the corkboard and hands it to him.

Fuck his life. There are _layers_.

“This is the list of temples,” Shinsato says. “They're all lettered and each one has a letter on the map that shows its location. A lot of the gameplay choices are related to actual Egyptian mythology, but not all of them. And then—” She flips through a series of other sheets of paper. “No, no, wait, okay, _here_. Route outlines. I emailed you a copy, but if you wanted to compare them to the map it's right—”

The rest of what she has to say gets lost in a klaxon screech from the overhead speaker, and an automated voice telling them a fire has been reported in the building. Shinsato tears the route outlines off their pin and starts scrabbling at the corners of the map. Kaiba grabs her wrist.

“If it's in Aspiration, it's saved. Let's go.”

Shinsato lets him lead her out of the room, only stopping for half a second by her station to grab her jacket. Ten stories is a long walk.

There's already a fire marshal outside by the time they make it out the side door, part of an endless stream of bodies slowly clogging the street and the sidewalks opposite. Shinsato shoves something into his hand, and he looks down at the flash of blue and white.

“I grabbed your phone.”

“ . . . thank you.” There's probably nothing on it he can't replace, but to someone who hems her jeans with safety pins, the physical object must seem prohibitively expensive to lose. He shoves the phone in his pocket, and then it hits him:

_Today is Wednesday. Where's Mokuba?_

He pushes away from Shinsato and dives into the sea of people, hunting for the red jacket and black tie that comprise Mokuba's school uniform. He has to be here somewhere. Kaiba pulls his phone out of his pocket.

“Siri, call Mokuba.”

“I'm sorry, I can't find 'Mokuba' in your contacts,” Siri chirps back at him. Stupid fucking AI. Seventh-gen phone, he'd think they could do better by now. He jams the phone back in his pocket.

“Niisama!”

He spots Mokuba's jacket, the one bright patch in an ocean of neutral blue shirts, and heads for it. Mokuba is waving frantically at him.

“I was in the elevator,” Mokuba says. “I never want to do that again. It stopped halfway between floors and I had to use my keycard to get out. It's probably still stuck.”

“It's a good thing you're short,” Kaiba tells him. The venue is too public for him to be comfortable with a hug. He puts a hand on Mokuba's shoulder and steers him back toward the building. There's a fire officer waiting for them.

“We're doing one last check before we declare it all-clear, sir, but it looks like a false alarm,” the officer says. Kaiba eyes the building.

“When do you think I can get the staff back inside?”

The officer looks apologetic. “You might as well send everyone for an early lunch,” he says. “It could be another forty minutes.”

And there are probably twelve hundred people out here. Great.

Mokuba looks up at him. “I can start telling people if you want, Niisama.”

“Yeah,” Kaiba agrees. “I'll grab a table at Suzuran before everything fills up.” He's never sicced the entire workforce on the surrounding area all at once before. It'd be interesting to watch, if he wasn't also trying to eat.

Maybe he can fix his phone while he waits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments? Concerns? Meta? Bueller? Come talk to me below!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone has setbacks. Learning to deal with them is just part of life . . . and afterlife.

“This is really starting to piss me off.”

He's starting to wonder if Shinsato broke his phone yanking it off the charger. Or if maybe it overheated.

Siri still can't find Mokuba in his phone. Or Isono. Or his office. His passcode won't work, either; it should be 514855, he could enter it in his sleep, but it won't take. Restarting didn't help.

If it wasn't for the damned case, he'd assume it wasn't his—

_Holy shit._

He flips it over and looks at the back. Hard white silicone shell over a light blue rubber casing, yes, but the maker's mark is missing, and there's a chip out of the case near the bottom that shouldn't be there. It's a third-party case, and not a great one.

“Niisama?”

He doesn't know whose it is. There were at least two other phones on the charger when he walked in. And the person it belongs to might not even be in the building. It's a six-digit passcode, like his, but he has no way of guessing what it might refer to or if it's random. He can't access the phone book to see who he might call to identify it. And the person it belongs to doesn't have their own ID saved as themselves, because when he tried to call Mokuba the Siri AI didn't provide a name.

All he can do is _wait_ , and the knowledge is infuriating. 

_—you with your glistening nails and decorated, beautifully finished hair, I want to embrace you! Your skin is—_

Well, he's reasonably sure it's a woman's phone, he thinks, as he thumbs the answer button.

“Hi, babydoll! I saw the fire department outside your work, what's going on?”

Kaiba bites his tongue and sends up a brief prayer for patience to anyone who might be listening. “You'd help me immensely if you could tell me who you thought you were talking to.”

There's a squeak from the other end of the line, and then a cough. “Who are you?”

“I'm pretty sure I'm 'babydoll's' boss. There was an evacuation and I ended up with the wrong phone.”

“Oh my god,” the voice breathes. It sounds young. Probably not a supervisor's girlfriend. “Oh my god. Kaiba-san. I'm so sorry—”

“Whose phone is this?” His patience is already gone.

“Kane's,” the voice tells him. “Uh—Shinsato Kane. She's working on a—”

“That's all I needed.” He hangs up, and Mokuba opens his mouth in protest. Kaiba pushes the phone at him.

“You're the one who likes the AI on these things so much, you make it work.”

Mokuba opens his phone book and picks up Shinsato's phone, then reels off Kaiba's number in a rapid blur. There's a ring, and then—

“Hi, baby! I wondered when you were going to call, something's wrong with my pho—”

Kaiba takes the phone out of Mokuba's hand. “Hello, 'babydoll'.”

There's a long pause. Then—

“Oh. Oh my god. I gave you my phone.”

“Yes, you did.”

Shinsato sounds like she thinks he might physically manifest through the speaker and bite her. “Mayumi called?”

“Should I assume Mayumi is the kind of person who calls, then screams 'hi, babydoll' into the phone before she has any idea who's on the other end?”

Shinsato sounds sheepish. “Yeah, she gets excited. _Crap_. We were going to have lunch together after the meeting and then that _stupid_ fire alarm went—”

“Are you coming back to the building today?” He really doesn't care about her lunch date.

“Yeah, I'm actually back in already. There's a cup ramen machine on the ninth floor so I just sort of went for that.”

“I'll pick up my phone on the way up.”

He hangs up. There's an investor meeting at one, and a pitch and bitch at three-thirty, and only if he's lucky is he actually going to get out at six like he planned. Mokuba makes a face at him.

“You like her.”

“She stole my phone.” Unintentionally, probably, but technicalities. Mokuba rolls his eyes.

“You _like_ her,” he accuses again, and finally Kaiba sticks out his tongue. Mokuba dissolves into giggles. 

“Come on. Let's go. I've got stuff to do.”

\----------------------------

There's probably a reason Mana is sitting in Atem's lap, staring deeply into his eyes like she thinks she might find the answer to the quantum question there.

Kaiba doesn't know what the reason is. He only knows she looks ridiculous, and Atem must agree, because after a few seconds the corners of his mouth start twitching, and then he starts laughing.

“No, no, I can't,” he gasps, as Mana sits back— _pouting_ , like he's mortally insulted her—“this isn't going to work.”

There's a sudden flurry of movement, and Kaiba blinks in surprise. He could swear Maha'ad wasn't sitting there before.

“You're missing the point,” he says, and pulls Mana off Atem's lap. “Internal focus doesn't mean you force yourself into blindness trying to stare him down. It means you gather yourself, then use your energy to _direct_ him. You're not possessing him. You're enabling him to possess himself.”

“ _Ugh_ ,” Mana says, and Kaiba stifles a snort. She sounds like Mokuba. “You do it, if it's so easy!”

Kaiba feels Maha'ad's eyes flicker away from Atem, toward him, and decides to step fully into the courtyard. There's no reason to hide if they're not trying to play with lightning.

Maha'ad drops to one knee and puts his hands on Atem's shoulders, directing his eyes. “Look at me.” He waits a beat. Then he lifts one hand, taps Atem's nose, and drops the hand back to Atem's shoulder. Atem blinks like a drowsy kitten, and then his eyes flutter shut.

“Tell me how you learned to swim.”

“I . . . ” There's a long pause. “I don't remember.”

“Yes you do. Tell me.”

“I was . . . five. I think. Very small. We were part of the procession up the Nile for the festival of Ausar and I fell off the boat. Everyone expected the nurse to get me, but she couldn't swim, and Father came in after me. I suppose everyone thought he'd simply lift me back onto the boat, but he made me kick until I could catch the edge of the boat myself. Abasi asked him if it was seemly for him to simply abandon his place on the boat and Father asked, according to teaching, if I wasn't Ausar's son. Then he scolded me for playing on the back of a moving boat.” There's another long pause, and then five words, so evenly measured they make Kaiba nearly shiver. “I would have never forgotten.”

“And you never shall. Wake up.”

Atem shakes his head, once, and blinks. Maha'ad smiles up at him, and Kaiba feels his eyebrows raise. He would have sworn Maha'ad couldn't smile if Atem's life depended on it.

“Well?”

“I remember my father,” Atem says, and there's so much love in the words Kaiba's actually ready to stalk off before Atem can spot him. He should, he guesses, be satisfied that he wasn't called on to seal himself in an arcane artifact for three millennia. Then Atem's eyes meet his over Maha'ad's shoulder.

And Atem, fuck him, _waves_.

“Kaiba!”

“Playing with hypnotism today?”

“No.” Maha'ad's voice is sour. “Hypnotism is a parlor trick for people who find it amusing to embarrass others under the guise of demonstrating trust.”

“Let's never introduce you to anyone in the self-help industry.”

Atem ducks his head down. Kaiba's pretty sure he's trying not to laugh. Maha'ad looks like he wants to be furious, and only Atem's presence is holding him back. Mana plunks back into Atem's lap.

“Okay, okay, I've got it this time,” she says, and stares in his eyes again. He bites his lip, tries to look away, and finally sticks out his tongue. Mana dissolves into giggles.

“I think you're thinking about this too hard,” Atem tells her. “You're concentrating so hard you're forgetting what you're actually trying to do.” He looks up with all the unconscious grace of someone who spends most of their life looking up at other people. “Kaiba, help me. Sit down.”

“I'm not susceptible to hypnotism.”

“It's not _hypnotism,_ ” Maha'ad interjects. “It's called reawakening and it involves using a heightened state of focused consciousness to bring old memories to the surface.”

“Hypnotism.” Kaiba sits and makes a good show of ignoring Maha'ad, wondering whether 'if looks could kill' applies to a magician.

“So humor me, and look—”

“But you've got the Millennium Puzzle, that's literally what it's _for_!”

Atem closes his eyes, and Kaiba doesn't need a Millennium Item to hear the thought behind them: _give me patience._ Then he raises his hands to the cord around his neck.

“Maha'ad, take this, please.”

Maha'ad takes the Puzzle with a strange mix of reverence and carelessness—a man who knows what it's for, who's seen it used so many times it's lost all impact. Atem meets Kaiba's eyes.

“What am I supposed to—”

“Shh.”

They sit quietly for over a minute. Then Kaiba blinks and shakes his head. Atem grins, the bastard. Mana looks furious.

“You're not _telling_ me something—”

“Just relax. Make Maha'ad take a turn. Come on, you can't make us do it and not do it yourself, you said that's the _worst_ thing any teacher could—”

“You're incorrigible,” Maha'ad says, but sits. Atem hops up, then grabs Kaiba's hand to pull him off the bench. His hand is warm, the gold it's sheathed in warmer, and there's a line of callus across the palm, and it's entirely too much to notice about a two-second grip that ends in Kaiba having to catch himself before he falls, like an ass. Mana plops down next to Maha'ad and pushes the shoulder-length cords of her hair out of her face. Atem grabs Kaiba's hand again, and pulls it.

He's not sure if he's following Atem to get away from Maha'ad, or to keep Atem from grabbing his hand again.

“What was going on back there?”

Atem slips into a room and comes back out with a pair of apples. He holds one out to Kaiba, then sinks his teeth into the other without waiting to see if the offer is accepted. At last Kaiba takes it as Atem swallows a bite that had to be way too big to actually take.

“When I regained my memories,” Atem begins. Then he pauses. “I don't know if you know any of this story.”

“I know it's what you needed the God Cards for. And I know it ended with you leaving.”

“Ah,” Atem says. There's another pause. “I . . . it's fair to say you didn't miss much. I regained my memories of the events leading up to my death, and a few hazy ones before it. But a great deal beside that was missing, and I only discovered it when I came to the Great Trial and at last here. Things I thought finally recovered were simply blank. Maha'ad theorized that perhaps my memories were there, but that I'd forgotten how to remember them. I don't understand how that could be, but he says he's seen it before.”

“ **Amnesia?** ”

“I don't know. I only know he's been testing the theory with a reasonable amount of success. I may never regain all I've lost, but knowing it's possible to remember any of it at all is comforting.”

“And you trust him enough to give him that kind of access to your mind.”

“I do.”

“You're crazy.”

“So they say,” Atem agrees. “Do you have time for a game, or are you sleeping in your office again?”

“It's night.” At some point he needs to bring Atem a digital watch to see if he can't determine why he can come to Khemet on a twenty-four-hour cycle and yet turn up at high noon one night and moonset the next. Atem smiles.

“Then let's play.”

\------------------------

“I'm using your shower, mine's broken again.”

“You could _ask_ ,” Kaiba says, and raises his head from the tub. It's not doing anything for his back anyway. He has yet to find the Japanese bathtub intended to accommodate a tall person. Mokuba makes a pathetic face.

“You're going to make me go to bed without a shower and I _stink_ ,” he says, and Kaiba rolls his eyes.

“Fuck my life. Use the shower. Start using a drain trap in yours.” He sinks back into the tub. Maybe he should accept the shortcomings of the bathtub and get a hot tub downstairs. No—Mokuba would have friends over one time and that would be the end of it. “Next time, I'm making _you_ clean out your drain.”

“Sorry,” Mokuba says. He doesn't sound sorry at all. Then he snickers. “You look like a grasshopper.”

“You look like a kid who's going to bed with no shower if you keep it up.”

The shower starts up, and Kaiba hears a thud. “Only if you're going to pull me out of here!”

He raises his voice enough to be heard over the spray. “Don't try me!”

“I love you too!”

Kaiba snorts and sinks back into the tub. It's been a long day—no, a long week. Really all he wants to do is sleep. Really what he needs to do is go back to work.

Really, he thinks, what's going to happen is this job is going to be the death of him.

Generators aren't supposed to fail in the middle of dev meetings. They're certainly not supposed to fail so badly the backups can't kick in. Nobody could get the power back on, and the entire crew had to go home half a day early because nothing would turn on.

Except Shinsato's crew. Faced with darkness in their own workroom they made for the sixth-floor breakroom and its expanse of windows, their reference books and world map in tow. Kaiba finally had to accept he was either going to have to personally kick them out, or let them stay and read.

To her credit, Shinsato didn't brag about having paper copies.

But the rest of the workday was a total loss, and even though KaibaCorp runs irregular hours—as long as the work is done he really doesn't give a shit when anyone clocks in or out—the power wasn't back on until almost six, the point when the building is emptiest. A four-hour loss, and downtime on the Duel Links Network to boot. Kaiba doesn't even want to think about the kind of questions the board is going to have and how it's going to probably mean another fight about running KaibaCorp off its own grid. 

Behind him, he can hear Mokuba talking in the shower. Not _to_ anyone, he doesn't think; he's passed by Mokuba's room before and heard the exact same thing. Some people keep image diaries, some idiots blog. Mokuba talks to himself in the shower, and occasionally aloud while reading. It's almost soothing, a regular stream of syllables without a whole lot of inflection. And no frustrated yelling. A huge bonus.

The water shuts off, and after a minute Mokuba appears, trying to twist his hair up inside a towel. It's one thing Kaiba can't help him with; he's always hated long hair, and he's never discouraged Mokuba from styling his own as he likes, but that doesn't mean he's going to learn how to do it for him.

“Niisama? Are you okay?”

“Should I not be?”

“Your eyes are red.”

“I've got a headache. That's why I'm in here.”

“Do you want me to get your—”

“It's not that bad. I just don't want it getting worse.”

“That's what they're _for_ ,” Mokuba argues, but he shakes his head and heads for the doorway instead of the medicine cabinet.

_You know why this keeps happening, right?_

Yes. Of course. And Mokuba will propose the same solution as always. He wonders what Atem would have to say, and then wants to bang his head into the side of the tub. Who the hell _cares_ what Atem would say. Probably something about accepting limits and taking care of himself. Mokuba, in stereo. With an amplifier.

At last he drains the tub. He still hasn't eaten. Maybe it'll help, maybe not, but it can't hurt.

He's halfway out of the bathroom when he stops. If it doesn't help, he's going to find himself in Khemet with a splitting headache, possibly dealing with Maha'ad again, or at least with Atem trying to mother him.

He grabs his glasses off the sink, and makes for the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments? Questions? Concerns? Meta? Incoherent excited screeching? There's a comment box below and I await it all!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moving on and letting go are not the same thing.

“Where is Atem?”

He does a good job of not sounding too demanding. He thinks. He's not even sure Atem's servants will answer him.

This one, at least, looks at him quizzically and then starts laughing. Kaiba opens his mouth to shout—

—and then the eyes open, and—

“What's with your hair?”

Atem blinks at him from under a nest of braids. “What about it?”

“It's . . . different.”

Atem stares. Then he breaks into more laughter.

“It's _night_ , Kaiba, just because you've never seen my hair down for bed before—”

“Braids are not 'down'. 'Down' is 'down'.”

The laughter turns into snickers. “Spoken like a man with nice fine _straight_ hair.”

“There's nothing wrong with my hair.” 

Atem finally manages to control himself. “I never said there was. It's very modern. Businesslike. Low-maintenance, I'd imagine. I like your glasses.”

“ . . . okay.”

Atem's smile is too knowing to be innocent. “You look older.”

“You look ridiculous.”

“Yes, well, it's not my fault you decided to show up after bedtime, is it?” Atem nods down the hallway. “I just wanted something to drink first.” He doesn't smile, exactly, but something in his expression changes in a way Kaiba can't classify. “I only have a few minutes, but you can join me if you'd like.”

Kaiba follows him down a series of labyrinthine corridors, below the surface of the earth and into a cellar. “All this for a drink?”

“We can't all have refrigerators.” Atem finds a leather bottle and uncorks it. “Do you want a cup?”

Kaiba eyes it. Something else he's learned from a basic readthrough: anything he accepts here is likely to be brimming with alcohol. “How strong is it?”

“Well, it's certainly not for children,” Atem comments, and pours out a cup. “But it's not meant to ensure you wake up in twelve hours with a sour gut from a single sip, either.”

“I'll take half. Somehow I get the feeling you know exactly how many sips it takes to wake up in twelve hours with a sour gut.”

Atem hands him a cup and grins. “I know how many sips it took when I was nine.”

Kaiba takes a cautious drink. It's sweet, not dry, and under the wine flavor he can taste other things, spices and fruit juice that isn't grape. “Are you going to share with the class?”

“Rather boring, really. There was a banquet, I didn't want beer, Maha'ad told me no, I waited until he was otherwise engaged and took his cup and then nobody else would warn me off. By the time he got back it was too late. I woke up the next morning and the first thing I did was get sick on him. It was a very serious lesson in moderation.”

Kaiba snorts. “Why does he put up with you?”

“I've never asked, but given the number of nights we've stayed up until dawn talking philosophy I'd wager genuine friendship is at least part of it.” He looks up from his cup, still grinning. “Why do _you_ put up with me?”

“I still haven't beaten you at senet.”

Atem laughs and pushes the braids out of his face. “Is that all?”

“You're not as idiotic as the people in my dev meetings.”

“That sounded dangerously close to an outright compliment.”

 _He knows. Fuck._ Fuck. _Shit, he_ knows—

“Kaiba?”

“I thought you said this wasn't that strong.” Very good. Not great, hiding behind a pretend weakness to hide a real one, but—

“If you don't want it, I'll take it,” Atem tells him, and reaches out for Kaiba's cup. Kaiba means to look in a different direction when Atem finishes off the last of the cup, but he's a little too slow on the uptake, and when Atem puts the cup down, Kaiba can only hope he won't notice the deep flush that must match his own.

“Next time I'll water it down for you,” Atem says, and Kaiba's ready to be pissed before he identifies an ever-so-slight but important difference: not mocking. Teasing. He's being _teased_.

“You do that,” he answers, doing his best to keep his voice steady. Atem yawns, so widely he struggles to cover it with only a single hand. “I didn't know dead people had to sleep.”

“The afterlife is a chance to experience life's pleasures again without nearly so much of the hardship,” Atem tells him. “Can you argue there's no pleasure in lying down after a long day, relaxing into your bed and closing your eyes to the world for a few hours?”

“Fair.”

Atem stretches and gets to his feet. “I appreciate your company,” he says. “But I really need to take my leave of you.”

“Get some sleep,” Kaiba says, and—

It's another two seconds entirely too short for everything he notices, and when Atem stands up again all Kaiba can do is try to breathe slowly and calm his heart.

“You'd best go for the night,” Atem says. “Before _we're_ up until dawn talking philosophy.”

“Right.”

Atem isn't even out of the room before Kaiba's in his own hallway. He looks both ways before stepping in his room. If Mokuba thinks he's actually trying to use the dimensional cannon again he's going to get skinned by an extremely angry younger brother, and if the butler is around he's going to have to pretend he did, but the hall is full of nothing but sleeping silence.

Braids brushing his cheeks. The ever so slight movement of his glasses against someone else's nose. Warm lips and wine.

And that last parting statement, implicit but deliberate in its meaning: not a kiss goodnight. Just a kiss between friends.

_Well, fine. You know where he stands. So let it go. Don't fuck up the one good thing that's happened to you this year._

He can't help wondering what would have happened if he'd known it was coming, if he'd had a chance to react. Maybe Atem chose not to linger to avoid the problem. And it _is_ a problem, enough to leave him with shaky hands and a heart hammering its way out of his chest. At last he pulls open his nightstand drawer and closes his fingers around a small gold figurine on a chain, and feels calm pour through him.

Some days he really loves being able to exploit the placebo effect.

There was a kiss. And clearly it meant a hell of a lot more to him than to Atem, who considered it a social greeting. He assumed Atem knew, that he could tell why Kaiba shunned the rest of his wine, but if there's one thing he can say unequivocally it's that Atem isn't the kind of tease who enjoys making other people miserable. He's mischievous, occasionally harsh, but not sadistic. Therefore—he squeezes the amulet, feels tiny gold claws against his fingers—Atem _doesn't_ know. 

_Fuck my life,_ he thinks. _I'm going to have to talk to him._

\---------------------------------

“I think it would help expand the potential player base. A child-based game is all well and good, but are there really people buying DLN equipment for their six-year-olds?”

Kaiba taps his pen on his tablet. “Sonoda, we've had this discussion before.”

“Yes, I suggested it when the DLN first came to the dev table.”

“And for the last generation of Duel Disk.”

“Yes.”

“And Duel Terminal as well.”

“Yes.”

Kaiba leans forward. “I would like to know why in _hell_ you seem to think we need to leave the family-friendly market to pull decent numbers, when the only company outranking us right now is Nintendo. Also a family-friendly market. And they just dropped a new console and two major titles. We're over a year out from the DLN launch and we're holding _right under a company going through a system boom._ When the server is updated next month we'll be back on top again. We don't need soft porn to be on top.”

“It's not that I think our numbers aren't decent, I just think there are demographics we haven't—”

“Fujima,” Kaiba interrupts. One of the other devs, a man with thick glasses and gray hair who probably got his start in this business when HTML was new, jerks up from his tablet.

“Seto-sama?”

“You have kids, don't you?”

“Three,” he agrees. “And two grandchildren.”

“Did your kids play video games growing up?”

“All the time, Seto-sama.”

“Did any of them ever say 'wow, Dad, thanks for the new system, but these games sure could use some more breasts'?”

Fujima looks horrified. Kaiba wonders vaguely if it's because he wasn't expecting it or if it just dredged up some really unsavory mental images. “Absolutely not!”

“Yamashina. Do you have kids?”

“Two. Twelve and fifteen. And mine would know better than to even suggest it.” She looks furious just thinking about the idea. He glances toward the other end of the table, looking for someone else with a wedding band, and then the door slides open.

Perfect.

“Hey, Mokuba,” he greets. Mokuba waves at him. “Hypothetical question. If someone said you had to choose between a game with six sidequests and a heroine in a metal bikini, or a game with ten sidequests and a heroine in a robe, which would you pick?”

Mokuba looks suspicious. “Is this a trick question?”

“No.”

“Are they _good_ sidequests?”

“Extra dungeons.”

Mokuba stares like he's grown a second head. “Dungeons. Duh. But not robes. Pretty dresses aren't going to save you if somebody sticks a sword in your guts. Chain mail is better.”

“You just got way too literal for this conversation. Drop your stuff upstairs, I'll be up in ten.”

Mokuba lets the door bang shut. Kaiba swivels back to Sonoda.

“I rest my case. We've had this conversation before. We're not going to have it again. If we do, it'll be in my office, am I clear?”

Sonoda's face is red. “Yes, Seto-sama.”

He turns to Shinsato. “Finalized designs next week. Based on the way you want the player characters to work you're not going to be able to tweak them again without making a hell of a lot of work for yourself.”

“You could always use the lab on eighteen for testing,” Yamashina says. Shinsato glances from him to her like she's watching a tennis match. Kaiba tries not to swear. “I know the AI in there is made for a higher graphics load than the DLN, but it's already set up for human-AI interaction.”

“What's on eighteen?”

“Side project I did,” Kaiba cuts in. “I wanted to see if it was possible to create an AI extensive enough to mimic a human being to an indiscernible level.”

“Side project,” Yamashina says. “Half the world has spent twenty years trying to overcome the Uncanny Valley effect and he puts together an AI indistinguishable from life in six months, and then calls it a 'side project'.”

“When I find a use for it, it'll stop being a side project.” God, he wishes Yamashina hadn't brought up the AI. He hasn't flipped it on since he found a way to use the dimension cannon.

“Can we see it?” Shinsato sounds entirely too eager. Fuck his life.

“I'll set it up later this week.” Unless she forgets about it first. He hopes. “Anybody else?”

“I've got a couple of people working on an accessibility patch for the DLN, but it's not really going to be ready to present until next week,” Miyashita says. “We're still working on a way to connect it to the mainframe that's within game rules.”

“Make it work,” Kaiba tells him. “Next week.”

\--------------------

“Atem isn't here.”

Kaiba turns around. Maha'ad is standing in the hallway outside the throne room, the last place Kaiba stalked into. Certainly he wasn't looking.

“What do you mean, he isn't here?”

“I mean what I say. He isn't here.”

“Where else would he be?” He shouldn't be irritated. Maha'ad is a friend of Atem's, and he lives—well—exists productively here, and also he probably knows how to creatively rearrange Kaiba's insides with an obscene hand gesture.

And he's staring at Kaiba like something disgusting he found on the bottom of his sandal.

“Unlike some people standing in this hall, Atem is capable of having more than one friend at a time, and even visiting them. Leave.”

Kaiba opens his mouth to say something about not being ordered around. He's barely taken a breath when Maha'ad's face grows even colder.

“Allow me to explain something to you, Technician. There is a great deal of difference between niceness and kindness and between kindness and goodness. I lived my life in the strictest observance of justice. I can be generous. No one but Atem has ever done me the insult of calling me 'nice'. Certainly I have no intention of starting with you.”

“What the hell is your problem?”

“I have no 'problem.' I have knowledge.” Trying to stare down Maha'ad is like trying to stare down a pair of river stones, and Kaiba keeps meeting his eyes only because to look away is to admit defeat. “Atem has the luxury of seeing you as an interesting plaything. A 'rival'. Someone to compete against. My duty, bestowed on me by the Millennium Ring, is to see things as they truly are. And you, truly, are a selfish, heartless child, a desecrator of tombs, a threat to the royal throne neither Atem's father nor I enjoy seeing walk the sands of Khemet, a destroyer of sacred rites walking the black soil of Khemet only because you walked it once before, and truly had Atem not expressly forbidden me from keeping you out we wouldn't be speaking now, because every iota of my power would be turned toward keeping you away from him.”

Lunging at Maha'ad isn't the smartest thing he's ever done. Knowing what he knows about Atem and how Atem fights, it's probably one of the stupidest. Maha'ad twists his arm down and his wrist back, and he changes his mind: _definitely_ the stupidest. He can feel his wristbones creaking in protest. 

“Atem forgives a great deal,” Maha'ad remarks. “I know about the game you called Death-T.” He lets go, and Kaiba stumbles backward a step from sheer inertia. “Go. This is your only warning.”

\------------------

_Has it always been this hard?_

He's woken up twice. Once he had the scarab necklace held so tightly in his hand the claws left a small red mark—a dot of blood under the skin.

Finally he sits up, looks out the window. He's gone before from the window, always a transition so smooth he can't even describe how it happened. 

It's not happening now.

_He said Atem forbade him from kicking me out._

_He said you lived in Khemet, too. He says a lot of things._

_So did Atem. So did the Ishtar woman. At some point I'm going to have to either start assuming the entire world is insane, or that reincarnation is possible._

It's a conversation he'd rather have with Atem than himself. He has questions, too many of them. He wants answers. No—he _needs_ answers. Before the dimension cannon, he would have never asked, and now the Ishtars are vanished into Egypt and Atem—

—Atem isn't letting him in. 

Someone is keeping him out.

_Someone decided I was too dangerous._

Stupid. He can't even handle looking in Atem's eyes without feeling his heart rate double these days. And what is he supposed to do, exactly, take over the afterlife? Introduce demons he doesn't believe in? Beat Atem at a game?

_Let me in. I need to talk to you._

Nothing.

_Please._

He closes his eyes. Atem and Maha'ad have a huge advantage over him: both are trained in magic. The only magic he knows involves a keyboard and code parameters. And whether he wants to admit it or not, both of them are able to do the same thing the dimension cannon did—with no help at all. Help he has to have.

_So what have you picked up from watching Atem? Relax. Focus. Push. Straighten your damned shoulders._

He does. He tries.

Nothing. Not the heat of the sun, not the sound of the wind.

He's been locked out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments? Concerns? Questions? Angry screeching? Leave 'em below.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Real life isn't always kind enough to allow for breaking into the afterlife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Have you ever yearned to go past the world you think you know_   
>  _Been enthralled to the call of the beauty underneath?_   
>  _Have you let it draw you in past the place where dreams begin_   
>  _Felt the full, breathless pull of the beauty underneath?_
> 
> \--"The Beauty Underneath," Andrew Lloyd Webber

There's music blaring down the corridor. Bad music. Probably an idol group of some kind. He doesn't care. All he cares about is shutting it off.

Then he opens the door, and forgets about shutting off the music.

Shinsato's workroom is full—no, jammed—no, some word of a magnitude beyond that. Some of the women sitting on the floor have their legs draped over each other so they can hold their laptops. Others are sitting on the computer table to accommodate still others underneath. The corkboard no longer just has papers in protectors tacked to strings to create a second layer; at this point there are things hanging from the ceiling, everything layered with laser precision to keep it away from the vents. The floor is an impassible mess of notes and binders, the whiteboard covered in lists, the single open wall papered over with what might be a collage of worldbuilding ideas. He can't imagine how anyone in here gets anything done.

But they all seem to be doing _something_ , some of them designing sprites and some of them with coding windows open while ARASHI blares out of someone's auxiliary speakers. Someone's far-too-good auxiliary speakers, frankly. He scans the room until he spots the most faded pair of blue jeans in it, and—

—and he's never going to be able to actually get across the floor to get her attention.

At last he steps out of the room and into the one adjoining, marveling a little that none of them ever considered saying anything about how badly their workspace is breaking fire code. 

Then he unlatches the movable wall, pushes it aside, and waits.

It takes about four seconds for most of the room to register the newly-open space, and another three for its inhabitants to stare at him, openmouthed. Then one of them—probably an intern, he's guessing, the side braid is definitely not a style he associates with people who are used to getting up at 4am for work—shrieks _oh my god, there are chairs_ and rushes past him to grab one of the swiveling seats behind him.

Excellent.

The dam breaks. A series of coders floods into the new space, and as they hurry to stretch out amid calls of _guys look there's another corkboard_ and _this side has coffee holders_ and _I can feel my legs again_ something slowly dawns on him.

Long hair, dangling jewelry, painted nails, Shinsato staring at him across the room until he motions to the hallway and walks out without waiting to see how long it takes her to follow.

“Sorry, they wanted to put some music on and—”

“Is there any particular reason your entire team is women?”

“Should it not be?”

“Depends. Did you put it together this way on purpose to make a point or did you actually put together a team based on the skills you need?”

“Well,” Shinsato says, and shrugs her braid behind one shoulder. “I started out looking for anybody who could do what I needed. I got a lot of nos. And then I hit the interns and a lot of the guys said no but a lot of the girls said they'd be _thrilled_ and when I was about two-thirds done I said forget it and just started asking only women to save time.”

“This entire project is being run by interns?” He's going to end the day with a headache, and his glasses aren't going to help.

“Well, Miller said yes, and I'm pretty sure she's been coding since the Buddha was in diapers. I—hold on, sorry—” She opens the door and pokes her head in. “Hey! Move that stuff later, we need at least one workable sprite for R&D tomorrow!” She shuts the door and sighs. “Sorry. They're all excited now. We can really use the second room?”

“Half this floor is dormant and you're in here building a firetrap. I never want to see that again.”

“You won't.” She looks sheepish. “Look, I know my team is really young. But a lot of them came in through the Gateways program and thought they'd be picking up something great for their resumes and instead they're filing papers and making coffee all day. They're dying for something useful to do and we're not going to let you down.”

“You'd better not.” And now Nile Blue is one more thing for him to monitor. Great.

\-----------------------------

He's never actually wished for an addiction before.

But a bottle to bury himself in or cancer in stick form to keep his hands busy would almost be preferable to sitting in the kitchen, staring out at the rain and turning possibilities endlessly over in his mind.

_It's Atem._

_It isn't Atem._

_That bastard is an asshole, but he wouldn't actually keep me out without Atem's say-so, he said so himself—_

_And how do you know Atem didn't count your stroke of absolute_ genius _as you attacking him again? What is it he called Maha'ad? The twin of his heart?_

_He accused me of trying to hurt Atem, anybody reasonable has to see that's so far out of—_

“Niisama?”

Kaiba jerks his head up. “Hey, kiddo, what are you doing up?”

“Thunder woke me up twice. Tomorrow's Sunday anyway so I figured I'd just wait for it to stop and then go back to bed. It's really loud.” Mokuba plunks down at the table. “Is that why you're awake, too?”

“Something like that, yeah.” He finds a marker in the cup on the table and pulls it out before drawing: four lines, two vertical, two horizontal, an X in the middle. Glass on the table was definitely one of his smarter decisions.

Mokuba looks down at the grid and takes the marker out of his hand before scrawling an O on it. “No, it's not. You're thinking about him, aren't you? The guy.”

“Mokuba, I've told you before, there isn't a—”

“ _Niisama._ ” Mokuba looks serious again, that strange adult expression on a face still half-child, and Kaiba sighs, then takes the marker from him and takes his turn.

“Yes.”

“Oooooh.” Mokuba grins. “Did you talk to him yet?”

“Not exactly.”

The grin fades. “You've got to, you know.”

“I know. It's your turn.” 

Mokuba draws an O. “When are you gonna do it?”

_Maybe never. You see, I can't get to him right now._

“I'm not sure yet.” He takes his own turn. “You're so interested, I feel like I should be asking you the same question.”

Mokuba snickers. “Nah.” He pauses and stares down at the board. Kaiba is pretty sure there's not going to be a winner. “I mean, I did kind of want to ask you something. But not about that.”

“Well, we're both here.” 

“There's a couple of guys from my cram school who wanted to start playing D&D and neither of them has a place they can play at home.”

“And you wanted to know if you could run a campaign here.”

“Yeah. I mean if you don't want people in the house I get it—”

“I don't have a problem with it as long as everybody stays downstairs.”

Mokuba grins. “Really?”

“Really. And I'd rather you do it on a day when I'm home.” It's not that he distrusts Mokuba. It's not even that he distrusts Mokuba's friends, although it's always good to be cautious. 

No, it's that he distrusts the combination of Mokuba, Mokuba's friends, sugar, and high excitement.

Mokuba deflates a little. “Junpei's got to be home on Sundays. His mom and dad go out and he has to babysit his sister.”

“There's no reason they can't come on Wednesday afternoons if their parents are fine with it.”

Mokuba looks even more stunned. “For real?”

“For real.” It'll mean doing dinner late on Wednesdays, but it also means Mokuba is finally breaking away from the kids who wanted to make Mokuba—

—no, from the kids Kaiba allowed him to become associated with, when he was too obsessed with possessions to recognize the needs of the living, breathing child in his care. It's a wound he'll never be able to completely eradicate, but maybe he can close it with a minimum of scarring. 

Mokuba leans over and hugs him. “Thanks, niisama.” Then he scratches an O on the grid and grins again. “I win.”

“Not fair, you distracted me with responsibility.”

Mokuba snickers. “You could've told me to wait, it counts.”

“It's the middle of the night, it doesn't.”

“A real duelist should always be ready, you've said that a million times, it counts.”

Kaiba caps the pen and shakes his head. “Okay, kid.” 

Mokuba tilts an ear toward the patio door. “I think the rain is stopping. Maybe we'll have good weather for Tanabata.”

Tanabata. Mokuba's birthday. _Shit._ It's not that he forgot it was coming up—it just slipped his mind that the end of June meant the beginning of July.

“You want to hit the festival this year?”

If he surprises Mokuba one more time tonight, Kaiba's pretty sure he'll never get him back to sleep. “ _Seriously?_ ”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah!” For a second Mokuba's expression is so wide, so open, he looks five again—all giant eyes and rounded cheeks. Kaiba hooks an arm around his neck and kisses his forehead.

“Then go back to bed.”

Mokuba slides out of his chair. “You try to sleep too, okay?”

“I will.”

But he probably won't.

\--------------

“Oh my god. He looks so real.”

Kaiba stands by the switchboard. The only thing activated right now is the sprite, and part of him objects to the fact that with the game simulation turned off Atem—no. The _other Yuugi_ , a sad ghost with no name, has no duel disk on. Shinsato circles him and stares. One of the other girls on her team, blonde hair over a Domino High uniform, sticks her face in kissing distance and gapes.

“You even coded his _eyelashes_ ,” she breathes. “I didn't know anybody else ever even _noticed_ those.”

“Rika-chan, when have you even seen his eyelashes?” Shinsato cuts in. Kaiba finds himself absurdly grateful. “At least Kaiba-san's dueled him—”

“Battle City,” the blonde girl cuts in. “I met him after a duel. That was when I decided I wanted to intern here. They were really going at it but they were having so much _fun_.”

“I was there for most of his duels,” Kaiba cuts in. “I'm pretty sure most of them didn't count as 'fun.'”

“Oh, this was one of his friends, I think,” she says. “The cute one.”

“I didn't know Mazaki could duel.” He's not sure he'd class any of Yuugi's friends as 'cute,' but if someone put a gun to his head and made him pick she's probably the closest. 

“Not her, the blonde one,” the girl says, and Kaiba suddenly wishes he hadn't gotten out of bed that morning. “He's got nice eyes too. But Yuugi-san has, like. Hello, makeup commercials, my old friend. He could probably blink really fast and just blow somebody out of the arena.”

Not a bad estimate, Kaiba thinks. And not surprising she was stunned to see them. He's never paid attention to Jyonouchi's eyes, but Yuugi's idol-level lashes are blonde, when he doesn't have makeup on.

Atem's aren't so long or so thick, but they're dark, and easy to pick out against the shimmering green and gold mica he wears on his eyes—a far and colorful cry from Yuugi's dull black eyeliner.

“He has _pores,_ ” one of the other girls says. Another one gets down on one knee at the sprite's waist level and squints. 

“Does he move? Because—”

“He moves,” Kaiba agrees, and flips a switch from one idle animation to another. The girl on one knee gasps.

“The fabric moves,” she says. “You guys. _The fabric moves_. There's no clipping.”

_No clipping. Wrong fabric, though._

And the skin is too light and the teeth are too straight and the hands are too big and the body is too tall.

And the eyes are too sweet, too light, too rational, a dull dark purple instead of deep and gleaming garnet.

“I mean obviously we don't need it to be _this_ high-res,” Shinsato says. “But can you do this with a 128-bit system? So the player looks down at themselves and actually sees their character?”

“I could, but it'd be like using a Wii to play Pong,” he tells her. “You don't need a full sprite for that. And actually in a lot of ways it'd limit you. This is the kind of thing you might use for digital co-op.”

“Have you tested if he holds up in gameplay?” The intern asking him the question has black hair and makeup and what he thinks might be a band T-shirt. He can't actually read the font on the front. “He's really amazing, but if we can't render the sprites in a playfield—”

He flips a switch marked in his own small writing. _Times Square._ Before he repurposed this room for his own personal disaster, it was a testing ground for something he called Pure Solid Vision—an attempt to make an actual moving playfield for tournaments. Still full of glitches, like the floor occasionally disappearing and letting players fall to the grid below, but still better backgrounds than Duel Disk Solid Vision.

The fluorescents go down. The New York lights go up. The half a dozen coders from Shinsato's team all stop to gasp. One of them lets out a muted _holy shit._

“Answer your question?”

“You can do this with the DLN setup?”

“By running it through the Crystal Cloud. Yeah.”

“Do you know what I think is the most amazing about this?” Shinsato turns back toward him, her face flickering in and out of shadow in the twinkling city lights. “This whole time we've all been saying 'he.' Even you. You didn't just cross the Uncanny Valley, you _vaulted_ it.” Her smile under the flickering VR neon reminds him of Mokuba's, all open happiness and crinkled eyes. “This is going to change the entire gaming world as we know it. Realistic players. Realistic _enemies._ ”

“If you can code them,” Kaiba agrees. Then he flips off the background. “I need to shut this down. I'll send you the code protocols this afternoon.”

Shinsato bows so deeply he thinks her hair might touch the floor. “Thank you.”

She leads her team out, and he turns back to the sprite standing alone in the middle of the floor, stuck in its idle cycle: hand on hip, staring up at one corner of the ceiling, blinking slowly like a cat. He walks up to it.

_You're not even a memory. You're just a fantasy. No—not even that._

He flips the switch to turn off the AI, and watches it cycle into a different idle cycle—head turned, still slowly blinking—before it flickers out. Shinsato said he vaulted the Uncanny Valley, but all he can think is that she's never seen the real Atem, if that's her opinion. 

_I'll get you back._

_There has to be a way._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments? Criticisms? Concerns? Leave them below!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life goes on outside the afterlife, even trying to get back inside it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this has taken so long, guys. My mom had a serious eye surgery, and I've had all my time taken up between taking care of her and going to work. This chapter is shorter than I really wanted, but I needed to get chugging again, so here it is--keep your eyes open for another shortly!

“Yuugi.”

“Kaiba-kun!” Yuugi's head jerks up from the magazine spread out on the counter. Kaiba casts a casual glance down at it, not sure if he wants it to be mock-worthy or not. No such luck—it's an inventory catalogue. “I haven't seen you in forever!”

“Not unusual. This isn't a social call.”

“Something I can help you with?”

He looks older out of his school uniform, Kaiba thinks, less a little kid and more a capable adult actually moving into the professional world. Maybe it's the makeup, toned down to just a hint of mascara and gloss. Or maybe it's the button-down and slacks, like he could as easily be heading to Kaiba's own work.

_You didn't come all the way here to dance. So don't._

“Mokuba's talking about starting a D&D group. I checked online to see if there was a specific set or something he might like and all I can find is a bunch of articles talking about how involved the game is, even when I try looking for variant tabletops.”

Yuugi makes a face. “Yeah, that's . . . a hard one. The fifth edition isn't so bad, but it helps a lot if you've already played tabletop before you get into it.”

Kaiba shakes his head. “The only RPGs he's ever played are all video games. And CapMon, I guess. I'm not really sure that counts as tabletop RPG.”

“What other kinds of games does he play? Digital, physical, doesn't matter.”

“Overwatch. Minecraft. I have a computer in the Danger Room that's got an emulator on it and he's gotten really into those point and click games from the 90s. He's working on Riven right now.” He pauses to think. “Risk, sometimes. He played Pokemon for about five minutes and got bored with it, but I picked up a copy of Terra Mystica the last time I was in New York and he went crazy over it.”

Yuugi grins. “Terra Mystica's great. So he really likes stuff with a lot of worldbuilding, then.”

Kaiba wants to snipe at him. Then he reconsiders. If he walks out here, he'll have to start over from the beginning somewhere else.

“Yeah.”

“Hmm.” Yuugi makes a face, eyebrows together and lips pursed. Kaiba can almost see him going through a catalogue in his head, flipping through games the same way Kaiba goes through card stats.

“You said he plays video game RPGS, does he do full RPGs or more basic stuff?”

“He'll play just about anything I let him get his hands on. He's big on Final Fantasy. I just picked up the new Zelda, but I don't think he's started it yet. There's only one set of game data on it.”

Yuugi grins. “Somehow I have a really hard time imagining you playing Zelda.”

“They had me at 'you can light things on fire'.”

The grin turns into snickers. Then Yuugi forces his face straight. “I'm going to say Pathfinder. It's a D&D spinoff, but it's kind of simplified down and opened up at the same time. It's easy to get bogged down in all the math if you go with D&D third or fourth edition, so Pathfinder cut a lot of that out, but D&D's also got some pretty clear-cut alignments and classes, and Pathfinder lets you be a little more creative. If you wanted to play a zombie paladin who uses a pair of supernatural revolvers you could probably find a way to make the rules allow it. And all the expansions so far are intended to be reverse-compatible, so you don't have to just abandon a campaign and start over if you want to incorporate new stuff. I'd recommend just starting with the base game, though. Don't add expansions until you know whether or not his group actually enjoys it. Waste of money if it's just going to sit on a shelf gathering dust. Are you going to be playing too?”

“Probably not, unless he really wants me to sit in. Tabletop isn't really my style. He'd probably get a lot more out of just sharing with his friends.”

“Yeah, I'd go with Pathfinder,” Yuugi tells him. “We don't actually keep it out here because the table space is limited, but I know we've got a couple copies in the back, if you want me to grab one.”

“That would be fine.”

“Hang on.” Yuugi disappears through a door under the stairs to the house above. Kaiba wonders vaguely what it must be like to never actually be able to leave work behind and go home. Then he takes a look around. Yuugi's grandfather must, he thinks, have some very strange ideas of what constitutes a good store layout. There's a Duel Monsters display crammed up next to what he thinks might be an antique backgammon board, a jar of D20s balanced on top of a stack of international games and a single sad shelf full of old video games tucked in a corner behind a giant box of random booster packs.

“Here, I pulled out one of the strategy guides, too,” Yuugi's voice says behind him. “A lot of them are more oriented toward longtime players, but there are a couple that are basically just tips for setup and new players.”

“Nice Monopoly collection.”

Yuugi's laugh sounds vaguely embarrassed. “Yeah, that's . . . that's Jiichan's. He likes foreign editions. I'm trying to figure out what to do with them. He asked me to reorganize down here while he's out and I don't really want to throw them out, but there's just no space.”

Kaiba considers just paying and leaving. He has what he's here for.

“I can tell you what the kids at Mokuba's school did with that kind of thing last semester.”

Yuugi manages to look more than just politely interested. He must be a better liar than Kaiba usually gives him credit for. Either that, or he's bored as hell. “What'd they do?”

“He's at an international school right now and after winter break a couple of kids had this idea to bring their own boards from home. They put them in a circle and every time you passed Go you actually went through customs into another country. If you wanted to conduct business there you had to convert your money into the right currency and speak the language the board was written in. They had a whole set of house rules for things the original wouldn't cover, like conducting business in a country whose language you weren't fluent in. By the time the game was over they had this entire economy in miniature going on.”

Yuugi looks absurdly delighted. “That's really cool!” The expression changes from delighted to thoughtful. “I wonder if we could do something like that here.” Then he actually jerks, like he's only just remembered Kaiba came in to buy something. “Sorry. Did you want to look around for something else?”

“Just a couple of booster packs.”

Yuugi smiles and fishes a box out from under the counter for him to draw from before pulling out a bag. It's paper. Kaiba doesn't remember the last time he saw a paper bag in a game store, and then he realizes it's probably a way to keep Mokuba from seeing what's inside. He's halfway to the door before either of them speak again.

“Kaiba-kun?”

“Yes?”

“This is going to sound weird, but what are you doing on Thursday? In the evening, I mean?”

“Server maintenance.” It _does_ sound weird. “Why?”

Yuugi looks vaguely regretful. “No reason. Hey, if Mokuba decides he wants an expansion pack come back, okay? I've got the last three expansions back here and I don't think anybody even knows.”

Kaiba nods at him. There's a humid summer breeze outside. It's almost enough to make him wish he'd brought the car. 

_What the hell was that all about?_

\----------------------------

“I need to ask you something.”

“You? What are you playing at, Kaiba?”

Kaiba sits on the edge of the control panel. “If you knew the only way you knew how to get into the afterlife was blocked off to you, how would you go around it?”

“I would trust in my friends.”

_Of fucking course._

“If you didn't have them to rely on. If you had to do it yourself.”

“If you think we'd abandon each other in times of hardship, Kaiba, then you don't understand—”

“I don't.” And he doesn't, not anymore. Not since Diva. “Just—if they _couldn't_ help you. Wanted to, but didn't have the ability. If you had to go it alone.”

“My friends have a great deal more ability than you give them credit for, Kaiba.”

Kaiba slaps the control panel in frustration. The AI winks out, and leaves him with no answers. Of course. The only advice it can offer is what he programmed in through the neural network. Atem might be willing to entertain the question, but Atem isn't here, and if he was, Kaiba wouldn't need to ask.

He sits for a few moments, staring off into the room. He could try again, he supposes. There's always the possibility that “what do you think they'd suggest” would yield more answers. But there's also the possibility, one he finds far more likely, that the AI wouldn't know. At last he sighs and shuts down the panel before stepping into the hallway. His phone rings.

“Niisama?”

“Hey, kid,” Kaiba greets. “You're home already?”

“Yeah.” Mokuba sounds weirdly faint. Kaiba switches over to FaceTime. Mokuba is pale. “I was throwing up so they told me to come home.”

 _Shit._ “I'm on my—”

“I'll be okay. I'm not running a fever or anything. I checked. I just want to go to bed.”

“Yeah, but I don't want to leave you al—”

Mokuba makes a face. “What are you going to do, sit around and watch me sleep?”

Kaiba sighs. “Take something for your stomach before you lay down.”

“I did already.”

“I'll check on you when I get in.” And he was going to stay in the second office tonight, but he's not going to leave Mokuba alone and sick. He can download a few files to work on at home and maybe call it a night early himself.

He packs up and grabs a packet of specs he meant to leave with Shinsato earlier in the day. Her paperwork is going to go up, but there's no help for it. Twenty-four people, well over two-thirds of them interns and only one senior coder. Fuck his life.

The lights are on when he steps onto the tenth floor, and he frowns. Surely they know better by now, he thinks. He drops the spec packet in the bin outside the door, then opens it and reaches in an arm to turn off the lights.

“Okay, excuse you, we're allowed to be in here,” says a ringing voice that, if not for the timbre, he wouldn't recognize as Shinsato's at all—angry to the point of being strident, and loud as hell. “We got permission from the boss, everyone in here is on the clock and and I don't _care_ what downstairs says we're not bothering anybody trying to get shit done!”

Kaiba stares at her. _What the hell?_

Then it hits him: she might be on the clock, but he's not. He came tonight to pick up a few files after dinner and talk to the AI. Her mental image of Seto Kaiba is one in long coats and expensive dress tops—not a slender man in jeans and a Star Wars tee-shirt.

Also, he's not sure she's ever seen him with his glasses on. And to be completely fair, he can't be entirely sure he'd recognize her to pass her in the hallway, either, her normal long braid pulled up in a messy bun and—

“Nice shirt.”

Her mouth drops open, and he sees fear flash across her face before she looks down at herself, and then back at him, and then he's pretty sure she can't decide if she wants to laugh or run. Or what course of action might even be most appropriate for that special, awkward moment that CEO and intern ended up in what could be a matching pair of Luke and Anakin shirts.

“Ah—” She bites her lip. “Thanks?”

“Any particular reason you decided to start yelling as soon as I showed up?”

Shinsato's face turns beet red. “Somebody's powered down the floor twice this evening. I know there's only four of us, but we wanted to keep going until midnight and it's making it really hard.”

“Mm.” Kaiba pulls the file out of the bin. “This is yours.”

Shinsato takes it, flicks through a few pages, looks back up and then glances over her shoulder at the three girls behind her, all intently staring at screens. None of them can possibly be over eighteen. Fuck his life.

“I'll get started on it tomorrow, but we're running a coding blitz tonight,” she tells him. “I don't want them to break stride.”

“Then I'll let you go.” He turns and heads out before she can detain him further. 

Mokuba is sleeping when he finally gets inside; he doesn't even need to go upstairs to know it. There's a certain kind of silence that's only present when human activity isn't, and it's settled over the house like a furniture covering. Kaiba slips out of his shoes and heads for the stairs.

“I gave him some ginger tea before he went to bed, sir,” says a soft voice, and Kaiba glances down the hall. The butler's wife has a bowl in one hand and a towel in the other, her hair pulled back from her face in a bun both tighter and neater than Shinsato's but not significantly different in color. “He said he thought he might have been in the sun too long.”

“No fever?” He knows Mokuba said so, but he also knows Mokuba could pick up his own bad habits far too easily. The butler's wife shakes her head.

“No fever, and he ate a bowl of rice just fine,” she tells him. “Plain, though. Easier to keep down. If he's right then he ought to be just fine come morning.”

“Thank you.” The words sound strange and wooden out of his mouth, but necessary. He probably wouldn't have given Mokuba rice. He certainly wouldn't have thought to do it without sauce. And he wasn't here when Mokuba dragged himself home from cram school, because he was too busy sitting on the eighteenth floor talking to a few million lines of code. Pathetic.

The butler's wife bows. Kaiba makes his way upstairs and into Mokuba's room. The lights are still on—not the floor lamps that actually illuminate, but the LED star map on the ceiling, a thousand tiny twinkling fairy lights that cast just enough of a faint glow for him to see the boy-shaped outline curled up in the bed. It's been forever since Mokuba left the stars on, he thinks, and then feels Mokuba's forehead. Cool, but damp, and after some deliberation he changes for bed and then bunks down on the sofa in Mokuba's room. Maybe it is just too much sun, Mokuba tearing around in a pair of jeans and long sleeves in hot and sticky weather, but maybe not, and if not, he'd rather be here.

Even if it means not being somewhere else.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Celebration is in order.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK
> 
>  
> 
> No, really, I'm sorry this chapter took so long. Moving + caretaking my mom + work = no real time to write. But it's here! 
> 
> Enjoy!

“If you don't get dressed soon, we're not going to get there before the evening crush, you know.” Kaiba stares pointedly at Mokuba, sitting in the corner in jeans and a hoodie.

“'m dressed.”

“Not for a Tanabata festival, you're not,” Kaiba counters. “It's too hot to go that way. Especially with all the people. Where's your yukata?”

“I didn't want to wear it.”

“You didn't want—Mokuba, it's over twenty degrees out there. You need to wear something cool.”

Mokuba just stares at him, not even bothering with puppy eyes. If Kaiba won't leave the house until Mokuba changes, they just won't go. It's a ridiculous fight, especially over a piece of clothing Mokuba's worn dozens of times since he was—

—ten.

“Come upstairs.”

He has no idea if what he's looking for is still there. It might have been thrown out, or destroyed by Daimon during his last weeks in the house. It might not even be usable.

But when they stand at the foot of the stairs onto the third floor Mokuba doesn't question him—he just reaches for Kaiba's hand and squeezes it, and walks up alongside him the same way he did when they were both still small. 

Kaiba pushes open the third door on the left. It's not locked, and that's something of a surprise, but the floor is thick with dust and the furniture is all still dropcovered—no surprises there. The bag he's looking for is still in the closet, and when he unzips it he smells cedar and lavender, not naphthalene. Mokuba peers over his shoulder.

“What's that?”

_He doesn't remember it?_

Well, good. Let Mokuba take it and make something good out of it.

“Yours, if you want it.”

“Really?” Mokuba leans forward and pulls the yukata out of the garment bag. Kaiba watches him bury his face in the bright purple fabric and take a deep sniff, and squashes the urge to tear it out of Mokuba's hands and throw it away. Then Mokuba grins.

“Is the whole thing in here? The shirt and the pants too?”

“Should be. Take a look.” He pulls back the dropcloth on the bed and sits down. Mokuba digs into the small pile of neatly-hung clothes and pulls out the rest of the yukata. Then he pulls up a couple of miscellaneous suits and looks at the kimono underneath. 

“These were all yours.”

“Yeah.”

“I don't remember you wearing this much purple.”

 _It was my favorite color._ He bites his tongue before he can say anything about being shoved forcefully out of children's clothes and patterns, and how Mokuba really doesn't have to walk around trying to be a pint-sized adult.

“I was this size for about five minutes.”

“Is it okay if I try on the kimono too?”

“Knock yourself out. I'm not wearing it anymore.”

Mokuba snickers. Then he pulls the yukata and kimono all the way out of the bag and brushes down the front of his little pile before staggering to his feet with it in his arms. 

“Do you think I can wear the yukata tonight?”

“Yeah, we can throw it in the dryer for ten minutes to air it out and it should be fine. The bag's for dust.” And protection from prying parents' eyes, once upon a time. 

Mokuba tears down the stairs with the yukata in his arms. Kaiba stays to hang the garment bag back in the closet, then looks around. Even shrouded in dropcloths, everything in the room looks too small. Crowded. Probably because most of the time he spent in this room he felt like he was the one too small.

_Fuck it. This isn't my life anymore._

He's most of the way down the stairs when he decides to go back up, just one more time. Not to the third floor, though—once was enough, and what he wants he would never have been allowed to keep in the small room with the window that didn't open. 

No, the bedroom he needs is the one he sleeps in now.

He literally almost runs into Mokuba in the hallway, fumbling with the yukata belt and frowning down at his feet.

“My geta don't fit.”

“Can't help you, I think mine are probably too small for you.”

“Hey!”

“Kid, your feet are huge,” Kaiba says. “Sorry. Grab some flip-flops. I'm sure you've got a pair.” He holds out a handful of torn paper strips and a colored pencil—not exactly ideal for writing, but he doesn't have any regular ones in the box under his bed. “Don't forget to write your wishes down.”

Mokuba stares, wide-eyed, at the paper strips. Then he pulls three out of Kaiba's hand, puts one up on the wall and starts scribbling on it before folding it in half and pushing the pencil into Kaiba's hand.

“You too.”

“I don't have any wishes.”

“Then wish to get wishes.” Mokuba puts his hands on his hips and pouts upward. Kaiba lets out a small smile and shakes his head, and takes the pencil. He stares at the strip of paper for a few blank seconds.

“Did you ever make Tanabata wishes before?”

“Yeah, in Kyoto,” Kaiba agrees vaguely. “The year before you were born. We all went to Tanabata matsuri together.”

“What'd you wish for?”

_If you tell him the truth, you're going to break his heart._

Kaiba elbows Mokuba in the side. “A kid sister. Duh.”

“You did _not!_ ” Mokuba sounds so scandalized Kaiba can't help laughing, and then he jots a sentence on his strip of paper and folds it in thirds before Mokuba can see it.

“Let's go, come on.”

There's a bamboo plant in front of the door, probably the work of one of the girls the butler's wife brings in to do the laundry, and Kaiba waits for Mokuba to get on tiptoe to reach the branch he wants before hanging his own paper two above it. Mokuba makes a face at him.

“Not funny.”

“You're right, it's not funny. It's hilarious.” And hopefully it'll distract Mokuba from wondering why Kaiba wants to keep his wish so secret. 

It works well enough to get them to the docks and down a row of food stalls, where Mokuba gleefully finds someone selling somen and Kaiba wonders if he should have wished for Mokuba to have a better sense of taste. In fact it works so well that Mokuba doesn't even bring it up until they're halfway through their noodles. 

“So what'd you wish for?”

“For you to not be so nosy.”

“ _I_ wished to pass my English exams,” Mokuba says. “ _You_ wished for a date. _One_ of us is going places.”

“I didn't wish for a date,” Kaiba protests. He kind of hates ruining Mokuba's joke, but he can't let it sit.

“Why not?” Mokuba demands, and then gives Kaiba a sour look when Kaiba gives him the _chew-with-your-mouth-closed_ face. “Niisama, did you do something stupid?”

He should be pissed. But—

“Maybe. I don't know. I haven't seen him in a couple of weeks.”

Mokuba's face falls. Then he climbs out of his chair and puts his arms around Kaiba's shoulders in an awkward kind of way that suggests there's significantly more arm involved than he remembers from sometime last week. “I'm sorry.”

Kaiba almost brushes him off. He hugs back, instead. “It's not your fault.”

“I know, but it still sucks. You should wish to see him again.”

Kaiba sifts through a myriad of possible replies. Then he realizes he's waited too long for anything snappy. “I did.”

Mokuba breaks into snickers. “I _knew_ it. So now you've got to try really hard to make it happen. I know. Skip work tomorrow and go see him.”

“I wish it was that simple.”

“Yeah, well, you better do something soon.”

“I know. Finish your noodles, there's a taiko group down here I want to see.”

Mokuba's snickers double. “Oh, _I_ see. You wanted to come because there's going to be a bunch of guys with no shirts on.”

Kaiba reaches out and pushes him—not quite hard enough to knock him out of his chair, but enough to make him sway. “Shut your face.”

“Hey! You shut _your_ face, I'm totally right—”

“There's an idol group listed in the program too.”

Mokuba tries to give him a sour look, but it's overshadowed too much by the eagerness hiding right under it. “No fair.”

“If you want fair, you should've stuck with presents.” Not that there were many, he thinks, and most of them painfully practical. A business card holder, a new jacket. A silicone and metal phone case that might actually survive Mokuba's tender ministrations for a whole month this time.

And Pathfinder. Mokuba actually shrieked when he opened it, and Kaiba already has the video password-protected because he's not going to let Mokuba delete it on him. He didn't take the hug for granted, either. 

“I'm going to eat _really really slow_ and make you miss the shirtless guys.”

A woman behind them frowns. Kaiba tries not to tense up and rolls his eyes, instead.

“Mokuba. They're called _taiko drummers_. And they wear a uniform. Just because drummers in rock bands wander around half-naked doesn't mean they all do.”

Mokuba opens his mouth. Kaiba raises his eyebrows and flicks a glance over Mokuba's shoulder. Mokuba's eyes widen, and then he sticks out his tongue.

“I _wish_ it was a rock band,” Mokuba grumbles. Then he shovels the last of his noodles into his mouth and raises his eyebrows back. 

“She's gone.”

“I'm sorry,” Mokuba says, and he looks so deflated Kaiba wishes he'd told the lady to go fuck herself and get out of their conversation instead of trying to cover up Mokuba's teasing with some kind of meaningless bullshit, and just dealt with the fallout later. But it's too late to change his decision now, and he slings an arm over Mokuba's shoulders when they stand up, instead.

“You don't have anything to apologize for.” _I'm the one being a coward._

“Yeah, but I could've gotten you in trouble.”

“Nah. Come on, let's go watch a bunch of fully-clothed guys beat the shit out of stuff.”

 

Mokuba snickers. “If you played an instrument do you think it'd be drums?”

Kaiba rolls his eyes. “Mokuba, I play piano.” Kind of. If he remembers any of it. He stopped taking lessons when he was fourteen, right after taking over the company.

“Yeah, but like if you were _really_ gonna play. For fun.”

“I don't know. Maybe violin.”

“You should play the clarinet.”

Kaiba stops walking. He's sure he's being set up, and he's sure Mokuba's sure he's sure, and he really shouldn't ask, but—

“I'll bite. _Why._ ”

“Because you stick it in your mouth and blow.”

Mokuba grins. Kaiba stares at him, not daring to actually answer because he has no idea what might come out of his mouth or whether it would even sound remotely like him. Mokuba's grin breaks into snickers, then giggles, and then outright laughter. Kaiba shakes his head.

They're in between taiko and the idol group when Mokuba stops staring at the stage and stares up at him, instead.

“Niisama?”

“Yeah?”

“What did you really wish for? When you were a kid and you went to Tanabata in Kyoto?”

“A sibling. I wasn't kidding.” And he wished again at his birthday, and nine months later wished to take it back, and today wished to see Atem—but alive, still part of Mokuba's life, doing his best to iron out every loophole and monkey's paw. 

It's not, he thinks, about being careful what you wish for—it's about keeping an eye on the devil lurking about the details.

Mokuba looks up at the stage. There's a girl with improbable pink hair and an overly-ruffly skirt welcoming the audience.

“They're doing this thing before fireworks, this year they have rice paper boats so you can let your wishes go off the docks and it's not supposed to be bad for the fish,” Mokuba comments. “Can we do that?”

_I wish for him to remember today for years. But for all the right reasons. Because he thought it was magical, and fun, and he had a good time eating shitty street noodles and making wishes. Because it was part of a childhood he never really got to have. I wish for him to remember that._

“Sure.”

\------------------

He's not expecting the headline staring at him from his phone. And it shouldn't affect him, really.

_Ten years later, a community still grieves._

He doesn't remember the last time he saw a picture of his birth father. Certainly not one of both his parents together. He's pretty sure it's their wedding day, his father's messy black hair half-tamed with grease and excessive combing and his mother with her glasses off and long brown curls pulled up in a cascade like a waterfall, both in formal kimono and beaming at the camera.

It's enough for him to read the article. A small town outside Kyoto, still rocked by the loss of a wealthy couple with great interest in local business. Two sons—

—missing and presumed dead. He wonders what bullshit his aunt and uncle had to spin to make _that_ the official story. There's a candid picture of him and Mokuba, still so little the tiny Seto in the picture had to hold Mokuba on his feet. He's six years old, six years old and already his eyes look twenty or more. Mokuba just looks fascinated. Kaiba wonders if it was Mokuba's first time seeing and recognizing a camera as a thing. 

There's a class photograph with his face highlighted in it, and a caption about how at eight years old he was already topping the nation in exam scores. He squints at the photograph—not at himself, but his classmates. Then he shakes his head and closes the article before opening it again and bookmarking it. He doesn't want to look at it anymore, but Mokuba might like to keep a printout of the candid. 

He sighs, and sticks his phone in his pocket, and flips a switch. The AI appears, cycling lazily through his idle animation.

_Not his. Its. You can pretend all you like, and no doubt it's an amazing imitation of life, but that's all it is._

Kaiba activates the neural network and drags a pair of swivel chairs into the testing chamber, where he sits. The AI stares at him.

“Is this a joke, Kaiba?”

“I'd like to talk to you.”

“I won't fall for simple tricks.”

“I know. I'm being serious. Please sit.”

He wonders for half a moment if the AI is even capable of sitting. He's never seen it, and he's reasonably sure at some point he probably coded it to be capable of falling on its ass, but this is a protocol he never had a reason to create.

It works, mostly. A little stiff, possibly some clipping on the jeans, but it can sit. Kaiba stares past it at a corner of the room and tries to collect his thoughts into words. 

“I lost someone,” he says at last. “Someone important to me. I didn't realize how important until he was gone. And then I got a second chance, and I fucked it up. And I don't know how to fix it.”

“A genuine apology can work wonders.”

“I don't know how to get to him to do that.”

“If you truly care about him and he doesn't want you to contact him, it's best to let him go.”

“I want—” He pauses. “I want to make it right.”

The AI looks perplexed. Kaiba thinks about the article bookmarked in his phone. He thinks about Atem saying _this is your only warning_. He thinks about sitting in this room until sunrise, coding rewriting manipulating searching and never being satisfied. 

He thinks he should have known the AI wouldn't have a good answer.

“If all you say is true, Kaiba, then you may not be able to make it right. You allowed fear and anger to overpower you and destroy something you hold dear, and there may be no getting it back.”

“I don't believe that.”

“Good luck,” the AI says, and Kaiba sighs and pulls himself out of his chair to turn it off.

 _Good luck._ Right.

He'll need it.

\-------------------

At first, he thinks he might be hearing things.

Then he hears a low voice, something that has to be a curse, and another low and musical tinkle.

That was definitely someone breaking a window.

He glances at the clock. Two twenty-two in the morning. Mokuba's room is silent. At last he slides open the nightstand, then shuffles into his house slippers and heads for the stairs. 

He doesn't actually take the time to peek into the kitchen before he steps in and aims.

“Drop it.”

And then he realizes the head his gun is aimed at is Atem's.

_Put it down, put it down, you son of a bitch at least put the safety back on!_

It's the expression on Atem's face, he thinks, that makes it impossible to get his traitor hands to obey him—the expression that says in this moment, he's forgotten he's already died. For a single hellish moment Kaiba thinks he might actually find himself pulling the trigger out of sheer reflex. Then his grip unlocks and he flips the safety before finally, _finally_ letting his arm fall. 

“I didn't know it was you.” Stupid. There has to be something better he can say. “I heard the window.”

“I wasn't actually entirely sure where your back door was. I'm sorry, Kaiba.”

“Oh, hell,” Kaiba says. “You broke into my house and I tried to shoot you, I think we can drop the formal by now. Want a drink?”

Atem blinks at him. Then his lips twitch, and then his eyes, and it really couldn't be clearer he's trying hard not to laugh. “Could I trouble you for some water?”

Kaiba heads for the cupboard, pulls out a glass, then stops and puts his hands on Atem's shoulders. They're perfectly real and solid, and when Atem smiles up at him and rests own hands on Kaiba's arms he fights the initial impulse to squeeze and be sure he's not dreaming. 

“What are you doing here?”

Atem's smile twists from contented to mischievous. “My partner is a genius, that's what I'm doing here.”

Kaiba blinks at him. He's reasonably sure Atem was telling the truth when he said he didn't have a—

“I told him I wanted to see you again. But I can't travel between Khemet and your places—I'm barred. So Yuugi tried to bring you to the game shop when I'd be there and when that failed he decided to see what would happen if he just didn't tell me where we were going, and borrowed Honda's moped.” Atem shifts his hands to Kaiba's shoulders. “And here I am. I have about two hours. I have to leave before the sun's up so I can go back and change my clothes.”

“Yeah, I'd imagine riding a moped in a skirt is inconvenient.”

“So is climbing ladders in one,” Atem tells him. “Today is inventory. Jyonochi came in to help him, since I'm here.”

“Great, I owe the mutt,” Kaiba says, and Atem makes a disapproving face at him. Kaiba rolls his eyes. “I owe _your friend_.”

Atem doesn't answer. Kaiba considers pulling away to pour his water. Then he hears footsteps above, and pulls away to turn an ear toward the door. If Mokuba walks in, he has no idea how he's going to explain anything currently happening in their kitchen. He slides open the towel drawer and pushes the gun into it to at least make it look less like a horror movie.

Then he hears the toilet flush, and a few more sleepy footsteps back in the direction they came from, and relaxes. He grabs the glass and fills it. He should probably look away while Atem empties the glass, but he's still too stunned Atem is _here_ , in his kitchen, in what's probably a pair of Yuugi's jeans and a blue and white shirt that's far too big for him. No wristbands, no jewelry, most of his makeup worn off and someone else's sneakers on his feet. If the voice wasn't so clearly Atem's, singsong accent stumbling its way over Japanese names and words, he'd wonder if he was dreaming.

“I owe you an apology.”

If Atem stares any harder, Kaiba thinks, his eyes might fall right out of his head.

“What?”

“I let my temper get the better of me. With Maha'ad. I knew better and I did it anyway, and I shouldn't have.”

Atem's face falls, but slowly, in stages—from surprise to sadness to resignation. “No, you shouldn't have.”

“It's why I can't get back in, isn't it? You warned me if I—” He stops. Atem is shaking his head.

“Maha'ad told me outright he tried to see what would happen if he provoked you. I wasn't the one who forced you out, although I have to admit I wasn't particularly pleased. He told my father you tried to attack him, and you rather made his case for him—that you were too dangerous to be trusted with me.”

“He called me your plaything.”

“Yes, I know. And I know why that bothers you so much. So does he.”

“He's an asshole.”

“I know that, too.” Atem takes a seat at the kitchen island. “It's his job. He's more zealous about it than he really needs to be. I think no small part of him feels responsible for how things turned out in the battle that killed me. He wanted nothing more than to protect me, and in truth there was nothing he could have done. He's trying to make up for it now. I don't excuse his actions, but that doesn't mean I condone yours, either.”

“But you still came to see me?”

Atem hesitates. Then he looks down at the empty glass. “I wasn't going to,” he admits. “For the reasons you've said. But something about it struck me as not being right. You don't lash out physically as a rule unless you were threatened first. I asked Maha'ad to tell me what happened from beginning to end. It didn't make things any better in my father's eyes, but I decided I had to see you again and hear your side of the story, if I could. And so here I am.” His eyes crinkle. “And besides, I wanted to see you.”

“I'm not a thing. And I'm not interested in hurting you. Yeah, Death-T happened. I'm not proud of it. But I can't change the past, and if I could, I wouldn't try. Everything that's ever happened to me has made me who I am now. That includes making shitty decisions. And whatever you did to my head. I guess to him none of that matters.”

“I don't think he knows.” Atem looks down at his hands, then back up at Kaiba, who finally gives up and takes the stool next to him. They sit in silence for several minutes, and then there's a loud slamming noise, and Atem jumps so hard he nearly stumbles off his stool. Kaiba swears and takes off at a run—one he thought was reasonably fast, but when he gets through the Danger Room, out to the engawa, and gets the storm shutters closed, Atem is only a few steps behind him.

“ _Damn_ it, Mokuba,” he mumbles, and pulls the shutters closed against the first hard fall of rain. “There's only three rules in the Danger Room, you'd think by now he'd—”

“The _what_?”

“It's a book reference or something, Mokuba started calling it that and it stuck. It's just the game room. But I have an original Donkey Kong cabinet in here and if he keeps leaving the shutters open in summer it's going to get destroyed. Electricity and rain don't mix.”

Atem looks around. Stares, more like, and little wonder; Kaiba's seen video game shops with a less impressive stock than his library. Atem cocks his head at the black cabinet in the corner.

“What is Polybius?”

“It's actually kind of a joke. There's this urban legend from the United States about this arcade video game called Polybius that was supposedly run by the government as some kind of psy-ops program. Available in Oregon for one month in 1981, then yanked off the market, not heard of again until 1998 when someone posted about it online. The most plausible theory is that the story comes from an early version of this game called Tempest that had issues in the beta release, and that's actually what's in there. I got the guts at an auction and had trouble tracking down a cabinet, so I decided to make one instead.”

Atem doesn't laugh, but he smiles. Kaiba counts it a win. 

“This is incredible.”

“Yeah, I like it. I'd like it if Mokuba learned how to close the shutters, too. It's typhoon season. A lot of what's in here would be hell to replace.”

“Have you actually _played_ these?”

“All of them except the one on the table with the boards out, under the box. I got it at a used game shop with no labels and no manual and I think it _might_ be a copy of Shougi Sanmai, but it's so damaged I didn't dare try to get the cartridge into my machine. I'm trying to extract the code to see what it is. Bad luck for the shop owner if I'm right, it's damned near impossible to find. Even a cartridge that can't be played would be worth a couple hundred thousand yen, but if I can get the boards working I can put a new cartridge casing around it. It'd be considered a homebrew at that point, but it'd play.”

“You're truly doing it for the love of the game.” Atem looks up at the wall of cartridge games—boxed games on top, refurbished rejects and used copies on the bottom. “Even before you began to find yourself you saw something worth saving here.”

“You can put it that way if you want. I just wanted to see how many I could actually collect and play. But most games aren't Super Mario World. You buy them when they come out or they're gone. Sometimes buying used is inevitable. Even _really_ used.” He follows Atem's gaze to a Final Fantasy poster. “I've got it, want to play?”

Atem smiles and shakes his head. “I'd love to. But I think it would be far too easy to lose track of time.” He shivers. “I don't remember it being this cold when it rains here.”

“They said on the news there's trouble about two hundred miles offshore. We might have a typhoon this weekend. Fuck, I hope not.” He heads for the door and flips off the light. “I can make tea.”

“That would be wonderful.”

He brews Atem's first, watches him stir in copious amounts of milk and honey and hold the steaming cup between his hands. “So now what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Yuugi's grandfather isn't going to be out of the shop forever. Eventually you're not going to have an excuse to come back here. If it even works more than once.”

“I'll have to talk to my father. I think it ought to be obvious enough that trusting the auguries of the Ring is a dangerous business and he should speak to you personally instead of trusting a tool we all know to be a force for evil. But I haven't give up, and neither should you.” Thunder booms, and Atem swivels to stare out the window. Kaiba wonders if he's afraid of lightning for half a moment before Atem slides off his stool and heads for the windows. Kaiba reaches down, picks up the two bigger pieces of glass from the broken pane and puts them on the table as Atem stares out, fascinated, cup of tea in his hand all but forgotten.

“No rain in Khemet, huh?”

“Not since I've been there, at least,” Atem comments. “Rarely verging on never in life, and so far not at all in death.”

Kaiba reaches for the hidden handle on the door and pushes it open, and watches Atem's jaw actually drop.

“It does open?”

“It does open,” Kaiba agrees. “The engawa goes all the way around. It's covered and everything. I don't usually close the shutters back here because the doors are glass.”

Atem steps over the threshold. The wind is high enough Kaiba lets out an involuntary shudder and watches goosebumps rise on his arms. Yes, there'll be a typhoon this weekend, unless there's some kind of meteorological miracle. Atem walks right to the edge of the stairs, like he might be in a trance, and stares out as the rain lashes his face. This, Kaiba thinks, must be what the scientists at Trinity looked like, or the people who first discovered how to make fire. There's another gust of wind and a tree branch comes down on the roof, and Atem retreats. Smart move.

“You can sit, you know,” Kaiba says. He's not sure the swing is the safest place to watch a thunderstorm before it turns ugly, but it's got to be better than standing right on the steps into the backyard. 

Atem takes the invitation at once and curls up on the swing. It's not so bad, Kaiba thinks, and sits beside him. The storm could go on for hours. At least it's warmer closer to the house. 

He doesn't think he dozes, but he must, because in between one blink and the next the sky goes from black with lightning to an uneven rainy gray, and when he looks to his right Atem's gone from staring intently to curled up with his feet under him and his head on one of the swing chains. Kaiba reaches out to shake his shoulder.

“Hey,” he says, and as soon as Atem's eyes flutter open he's on his feet and swearing in Khemetic. Kaiba plants his feet before the swing can go backward through the window. 

“What—”

“I'm late,” Atem tells him. “I have to go.”

“Don't worry about it, I can take you over in the car—”

“No time,” Atem says. “I have to go _now_. They'll know.”

“Wait—!”

“Thank you, Seto,” Atem says.

And then he's gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Questions? Comments? Concerns? Leave 'em below!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaiba has to work through a few things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Take me to church_   
>  _I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies_   
>  _I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife_   
>  _Offer me that deathless death_   
>  _Good God, let me give you my life_
> 
> \--Hozier, "Take Me To Church"

“You _are_ persistent, aren’t you.”

“Always.” Kaiba looks up at the silhouette standing under the tree in the torchlight and closes his fingers around the small string of beads he found under the bench. They’re ivory and gold and, he’s reasonably sure, Atem’s. Of course someone would come after him when he’s on his knees, and of course being halfway under a bench means he has to use it to pull himself up. “Who are you?”

“My name is Akhenemkanon.”

_Shit._

“You’re Atem’s father.”

“I am.”

“Where is he?”

“You won't see him tonight.”

“Then I’ll go.”

“I would prefer you stay.”

“I thought you wanted me out.”

Akhenemkanon doesn’t answer. He simply looks for a moment longer, then turns and crosses the courtyard with all the gliding grace of someone who used to cross this expanse of space with a book balanced on his head. The implication is clear: follow. Not a request, either.

The room Akhenemkanon leads him to isn’t the throne room. Close, though, close enough Kaiba thinks he can trace a path from one to the other without even having to look. There are no windows, and even during the day this room must be lit by torches. A dangerous concept, given the piles of scrolls and maps in the corners. There’s a table in the middle, and Akhenemkanon sits. Kaiba stays standing. Not an equal position, but Atem didn’t get his height all from his mother’s side, and being able to look down is a good option. If the old pharaoh is bothered, though, it doesn’t show.

“I would like to know your intentions toward my son.”

_Wait, what?_

“I think you need to clarify.”

“For the first time since his birth I have seen my only child look me directly in the face and lie. He has practiced deceit to speak with you and, when I charged him with his actions, he grew restless to the point of anger. You have sown discontent and tension in my household and confusion among its inhabitants. From Maha’ad I hear the auguries of the Ring, that you are an untrustworthy and vicious man with the reputation of a god, the mannerism of a crocodile, and the soul of one I should never have trusted. From Atem I hear a confused but passionate story in which you play an equal role as friend and beloved rival. Can I fully trust the Ring? No. Its history as a tool of evil as well as good is well-documented. Can I, then, fully trust my son? And then, too, the answer is no. I may forgive his recent indiscretion and still find myself painfully aware of the ways his mind has been damaged because he sealed himself away. His memory may well be destroyed beyond repair, and he knows it as well as I. I love him dearly, but at present there is no safe way to trust his testimony. And so at his request I ask you this question directly. I will ask once, and not again.”

“Until just now I didn’t know I was supposed to have intentions.” He glances at the gold amulet laying against Akhenemkanon’s chest, the wadjet in the middle of the ankh gleaming low and dark in the torchlight. “Why not just use that thing if you’re so afraid I’m going to lie?”

“I carry the Millennium Key today for protection. Not interrogation. I need no magic to see truth or lies in your face.”

“Let’s start when I met him, then. He was crazy. So was I. He spent three thousand years locked in a brick and I . . . I was watching my world turn itself upside down and didn’t know how to control it. He tried to kill me, I tried to kill him, he sent me into what we call a complete psychotic breakdown, it was pretty terrible for both of us. When I started to recover he'd already started to change. To become human again. We faced each other in a games tournament. For him the prize was a chance to learn about his past. He won. I left for America. When I was there I realized I wanted to face him again, on the same terms as the first time. But truthfully, not as a pretense. His friend . . . do you know about Yuugi?”

“I do.”

“His friend invited me to the game that decided his life. I thought he meant to challenge me there. But I was mistaken, and I showed up a few minutes too late to say goodbye.”

“And thereafter?”

“I went back to Domino.”

“Atem claims you created an ushabti and fulfilled the rites that allowed him access to his full soul and a life in the Field of Reeds.”

_What the hell?_

“I don't think--wait, is he talking about _the AI?_ It's just a computer program. A duel simulator. I don't even know how he knows about it.”

“Through Maha'ad, who saw in part the actions of two days before he sealed the Ring away forever. You designed this . . . _ey-ah_ to resemble my son.”

“Not so much. What he looked like when Yuugi could summon him.” And maybe the eye color is 660000 instead of 660099 now, but nobody here would have any way of knowing it. “It doesn't even have a full neural network, I--” Akhenemkanon looks like he's trying not to look perplexed. Kaiba runs back over what he just said and realizes he lapsed back into Japanese. Shit. “It means the only thing it can learn is game rules.”

“You restored the Puzzle and called his name. This is a great blessing. But to what purpose?”

Kaiba thinks about saying _because I wanted to._ Or _why do you care._ Maybe _this is bullshit, where's Atem._

None of those are going to help him.

_What matters more? Your pride, or your objective?_

“I wasn’t ready to let him go.”

“And now?”

“At some point I tripped and I think we ended up friends.”

“Only that?”

“What do you mean, only that?”

“You bring him gifts, seek his approval, express jealousy toward his friends, meet with him in the night and, when ill, you bend your entire will toward reaching him to sleep in his arms. Am I to believe this is what you call friendship?”

“The night I was sick I don't know _how_ I got here, all right, and he was the one who decided he was going to come back with me--”

“You could easily have stopped him.” Akhenemkanon isn't quite smiling. Bastard. Kaiba thinks back to the night Atem escorted him back and how even with assistance he staggered like he was half-dead or drunk and wonders how he was supposed to stop Atem from slitting his damned throat, if he'd wanted, and then entirely unbidden the thought twists into Atem with his hair up in braids and wine on his lips. Akhenemkanon stands up, and Kaiba very nearly panics. He's going to be shut out--

“I see this is perhaps a question you haven't answered even for yourself,” he comments. “When you feel you have a satisfactory conclusion, you know how we may speak.”

“What's wrong with Atem?”

This time there is a smile. Definitely a smile. “Nothing at all. He was awake before the sun and spent his morning in study with Maha’ad and Mana, and his evening in the throne room with me. Between he had barely time for a meal. He fell asleep in the middle of council and I thought it prudent to excuse him. By the time we adjourned it was after sunset, and he'd set with it. I find nothing surprising in it.”

“He's not sick, is he?”

“Illness rarely if ever comes to the Field of Reeds. But Atem never does anything without his entire heart. If you know him as well as you say, this must be familiar to you.”

“In America they say ‘work hard, play hard, sleep hard’.” He's loved the phrase since the first time he heard it, his entire philosophy in a sentence. Except, perhaps, the sleep. Atem will have to cover that angle for him.

“Yes. Quite fitting.”

Kaiba nods and lets himself be dismissed. It's raining back in Domino, blowing hard outside the window, and after a moment’s thought he opens the french windows.

He's reasonably sure Atem won't come. Kaiba has an obstacle to get past first, and that obstacle has a beard and a crown and a very serious amount of power. They won't see each other again until Kaiba gives Akhenemkanon the answers he wants.

But he wants the windows open. Just in case.

\--------

“You could make this a great deal easier on yourself.”

“I don’t know what he wants me to say.” 

“It isn’t a matter of what you say. It’s a matter of whether you’re honest with him, and yourself.”

There’s no question whether this is a dream; Kaiba’s never been in Atem’s room, but he’s reasonably certain it’s not a strange Khemetic mashup of Mokuba’s. Atem doesn’t really have an LED map of the stars on his ceiling. He probably doesn’t have a bookshelf with CapMon characters painted down the side, either. Even if he’d suggested he wanted such a thing, Kaiba hasn’t been in Khemet long enough to stencil one, much less paint and varnish it.

“Why here?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“This is a dream. You’re not here. Not really. You’re _me_. Trying to tell me something. That’s what dreaming is. Why Mokuba’s room?” He plops down on the bed, and realizes with a start that the bed is his own--from Kyoto. When he was four, before the Tanabata wishes and the medical emergencies and the end of the world, his favorite thing was planes. He’s pretty sure his mother quilted the bedspread herself. He’d recognize it anywhere. 

“What do you think of this room? It’s nice, isn’t it?”

“It should be, Mokuba and I put it together.” Except the bed. Mokuba picked out plain sheets and covers, a hideous neon green and purple Kaiba could have tried to talk him out of but didn’t. And the nightstand, which is Kaiba’s own, and not from Kyoto. There’s a pair of glasses on it, not his own--his are square and burgundy and matte wire, and the ones on his nightstand are round and gold and undeniably feminine--and familiar. 

_Were these Mom’s?_

Maybe. Probably. He doesn’t know many women who wear glasses. For that matter, he doesn’t know many women. Atem lounges on Mokuba’s closet door and blinks slowly at him. Kaiba throws his hands in the air.

“ _What?_ ”

“Are you ready to be honest?”

“I was honest.”

“ _Truly_ honest.”

Kaiba pushes himself off his childhood bed. “This is bullshit,” he says, and reaches for the doorknob, only to watch it melt under his fingers and turn into blank gray stone. He turns around. Atem is gone. So is Mokuba’s room. Instead he’s staring into a labyrinth not unlike the one in the M.C. Escher poster on Mokuba’s wall--mostly dark, and full of echoes. 

“What the hell?”

He rolls over in bed and sits up, unusually unnerved by the lingering twin images of a woman’s glasses and a maze he’s sure is a metaphor of some kind, some bullshit his brain cooked up to wake him at--he checks his phone and lets out a soft _fuck_ under his breath--three-thirty in the morning. 

Well. It means _something_. He’s not in the habit of dreaming about nothing at all.

He walks out through the french windows, hot breeze pulling his hair back from his forehead and whipping it around his neck. It's going to rain.

Atem has never been in Mokuba's room. He's only been in the house once, for that matter. Certainly there's nothing to connect him to Kaiba’s childhood bedroom. The best Kaiba can come up with is a tenuous connection between his childhood favorite colors and Atem’s preferred wardrobe.

_Or is he right, and you're not being honest with yourself?_

_I'd believe that if I could understand anything that happened._

At last he sighs and heads back inside. He's never going to get back to sleep, and finally he heads downstairs for a cup of tea and his visual journal. He takes both to the swing at the back of the engawa, looking out at the garden and sketching the labyrinth from the end of his dream as the first raindrops patter down.

_You could have kissed him right here, you know._

He stops in the middle of shading a brick and stares out at the trees, silhouetted by lightning. _I could have--_

_At the very end, when you tried to keep him from going. What were you planning to do?_

_. . . I don't know. I just didn't want him to leave._

_You could have kissed him._

Not, strictly speaking, untrue. They were sitting down, and most of Kaiba’s height is in his legs. But he's also reasonably sure his kissing Atem would be taken very differently than Atem kissing him.

_And?_

And it could give Atem ideas. He's on a visiting-terms basis with modern culture, not completely ignorant of it.

_And?_

And . . .

_And if I gave him ideas we’d have to talk about it._

_And?_

And for the first time since he was six he has someone who's on a similar mental footing and knows his secrets and has never used them as weapons against him.

_And?_

And isn't his brother. He could stand for Mokuba to have been shielded from a lot more of his secrets than he's been able to hide. Talking to him about them is out of the question.

_And?_

And he's physically attractive. Trying to claim otherwise is like pretending Yuugi isn't a skilled duelist--it's contrariness bordering on stupidity, for its own sake. Petite but confident and entirely proportionate to himself, warm smile, deep red eyes that haven't bedded a thousand women probably only because he died too young to have had the time.

_Women?_

Somewhere far away Kaiba hears his pencil hit the floor of the engawa and roll away. Immediately in the front of his thoughts is the day he sarcastically called Maha’ad Atem's boyfriend, meaning to underline how overprotective he seemed, only for Atem to laugh until tears stood in those coal-ember eyes and--

\--and suggest the problem with the equation was _Maha'ad._

_Holy shit._

_And?_

. . . Fuck.

\--------------

“This is getting old, you know!”

The labyrinth is gone, and he's in a room well-lit by torches but without a single door or window. A very solid room, too--this is no dream.

He was in the second bedroom, trying to nap between teleconferences, and now he's in Khemet.

“I don't have answers for you,” he says, addressing himself to the ceiling for lack of a more concrete target. “You're asking the wrong person.”

There's a long pause, long enough for Kaiba to wonder if Akhenemkanon's solution to his problems is to leave Kaiba in a sealed room until the torches go out and he asphyxiates. Then he feels a playful hand dance up the back of his jacket and ruffle his hair, and when he spins around Atem is standing there, eyes full of mischief.

“Is he, or is this just a conversation you'd rather not have?” The eyes sparkle. Oh no. “Close your mouth, you look like a crocodile. Or I'll do it for you.”

“What--”

He's going to have to have a serious talk with Atem about neckties, and how they aren't handles to pull taller people around by, but not right now, not with Atem's lips on his.

_I wonder if he--_

The gasp Atem lets out when Kaiba’s tongue touches his lips is actually audible, and then Kaiba opens his eyes to the deep and echoing silence of the second bedroom and sighs.

It was a dream after all.

Bullshit.

And what's more bullshit still, now he genuinely wants to know if Atem has any idea what French kissing is. It's the kind of thing his history books chose to skip.

_It wasn't a dream. Not all of it. Atem probably was, but that room, no, that's a puzzle. That's something you have to figure out._

The room is Akhenemkanon’s idea, he’s sure. A way to block him off from Atem while still allowing him access to Khemet, where apparently his beating heart and breathing lungs make it possible to sense his presence. Once there, he’ll be asked the answers to the questions Akhenemkanon asked him before.

At last he swings his legs off the futon and heads across the promenade to the jackleg coffee bar. Thank somebody for K-cups. 

He’s already got a legal pad in the bar, a few of them, in fact, and by the time he has a tea pod in the brewer and a cup underneath he's got one with a clean front page and a pen.

There are three options, he thinks. Say nothing, be locked out of Khemet forever--not really an option at all. Suggest nothing about his interest has changed since he first came to Khemet, bullshit his way through it as best as possible, spend ever after in stagnation with Atem as a friend and companion, nothing more. Or-- 

_Nope._

Or show his own weakness.

If Gozaburo was still alive and sitting in the bar, Kaiba would be on his knees in front of it with his back beaten raw just for entertaining the idea. The _terrifying_ idea. Telling the truth means putting himself entirely at Atem’s mercy--his life, feelings he still doesn’t know how to sort and quantify, potentially even his soul.

Underneath his options he writes Atem’s name. What does he really know of the half-mad teenage king who’s challenged his every preconception?

 _He’s kind. He can be hard because life is hard, life is a bitch and a half and he’ll rise to meet the challenge, but given the choice he’d rather not. He’s a tease, and not to be cruel--he just loves leaving people speechless._ Like asking if they’re sure they’re going to pull victory from the jaws of defeat while they gloat. Or kissing them over a bottle of wine. 

_He’s fair._

Yes--it galls him to admit it, but his every loss at Atem’s hands has been the result of worse luck or less skill. Atem isn’t a cheater. A trickster, yes--but it’s a perfectly legitimate strategy. Atem has always put a great deal of emphasis on following the rules. 

Atem isn’t, never has been, the kind of person who would hear a confession and throw it back in the confessor’s face. And while he can’t be sure of Akhenemkanon, doesn’t know him well enough to make any but the vaguest of guesses, he can assume anyone as naively honest as Atem had to spring from a source that didn’t teach lessons with shock collars and pain.

He crosses out the second option and circles the blank space where he didn’t write the third. Then he glances up at the clock on the wall, the little atomic one he brought home from New York that stays keyed to its home timezone, so useful. He has fourteen minutes to get dressed and get upstairs.

_Okay._


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cooperation is also a game.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . . . . I got nothing this time, kinderlach. Sorry it's so short. It's all about the dramatic timing on this chapter.

“Ugh, I want to take whoever coded this and slam them into the nearest flat surface--”

“Keiko--”

“--and make sure they know _just_ how much I appreciate their tags--”

“ _Keiko--_ ”

“--possibly by bearing their children--”

“Utsume-chan!” Shinsato pushes her bangs off her face where they’ve started to come undone from her braid. 

“I think that’s the most explicit compliment I’ve ever gotten on my work. But no thank you.” Kaiba pushes off the doorframe. Utsume covers her mouth with both hands and turns as red as her ringlets. Kaiba considers disciplining her for her outburst, and then decides it’s Shinsato’s problem. In two or three months it might be his if it continues, but he’s not going to scuttle an entire evening’s worth of work over a hormonal teenager who didn’t know he was in the room. Instead he nods at Shinsato, and she puts down her coffee mug before following him into the hall.

“Is there a reason you skipped the R&D meeting today?”

Shinsato’s brows draw together. “There was no R&D meeting today, they’re only on Tuesdays. I’ve got them on the whiteboard so people know when I’m out and everything.”

“And there was an extra one today because the last one was canceled. You should have gotten an email about it.”

Shinsato’s face is a perfect mix of _oh shit_ and _what the fuck._ “I haven’t gotten any emails in the last four days that didn’t come from Aspiration. Here, look.” She pulls out her phone to show him her inbox, and he frowns. The email is a kaibacorporation.com address, but--

“Is there some message I missed about how you transliterate your name?” The username in front of him is spelled S-H-I-N-Z-A-T-O. Shinsato makes a face.

“It was misspelled when I got my department email,” she says, and Kaiba wonders why nobody fixed it before it was assigned to Aspiration and a coder ID. Creating a new email address is easy; fixing it now is sixteen different kinds of hassle. Then he wonders why her name is spelled with two S’s in the mailing list he got from R&D, and then he decides to shelve it and worry about it later.

“I expected an update from you today on where Nile Blue stands.”

Shinsato looks surprised. “I mean--about the same? One of the girls did these _gorgeous_ watercolors that almost look like mirages that we’re trying to translate into game backgrounds. Or, well, not ‘trying,’ we’re doing it, it’s just not as easy as doing flats. I think it’s going to look way better, though. A couple of people are doing some preliminary recoding on the AI stats so we know exactly where to plug in values once we have finalized character art. That hair is ridiculous.”

“Yeah, I think Mutou’s trying to keep the hair gel companies in business.”

Shinsato laughs and pushes her bangs out of her face. “So, I mean, that’s where we are. Concept art, recoding, and I had this idea, you know how originally I was thinking we should just have sprites moving in realtime? What if we coded it so _the player_ is the AI?”

Kaiba furrows his brow. “Explain.”

“Okay, so--you’re familiar with first-person games, right? Like Fallout?”

“Of course.”

“Why can’t we code the player sprite so you look down, and you see the character, instead of yourself? So it’s like you’re _in_ the game? Like--literally overlay the character on top of the player’s body?”

Kaiba turns it over in his mind. It’s ambitious, to say the least. “And?”

Shinsato blinks at him.

“You were thinking. Why can’t you?”

She stares. Kaiba doesn’t exactly stare back; ‘staring’ implies greater intensity than he feels the question really merits.

“This isn’t primary school, Shinsato. Either you do something or you don’t. There is no ‘why can’t we.’ Do it and present it at the next meeting. Or don’t. It’s your project. Your job is to make it worth marketing.”

Her expression, Kaiba thinks, is a little terrifying--like Mokuba might look if Kaiba handed him the keys to a Ferrari and told him the speed limit was cancelled. “Seriously?”

. . . of course, he thinks, racing strips exist, as long as you have a coach to tell you when to turn.

“Yes.”

Her grin is almost fiendish. “ _Awesome,_ ” she says, and then there’s a hideously loud beep and her head swivels. “I told you guys _not to use the printer!_ ” she wails, and darts back into the room without waiting to be excused. Kaiba shakes his head.

What a headache.

\-----------------------------

“I wondered if you would return.”

“I have an answer to your question. I think.”

“Oh?”

Kaiba takes a deep breath. He’s practiced this. In the shower, in between conference calls, late at night in the dead hours looking at himself reflected in bright windows looking out over a 2am Domino. 

_Come on. You’ve done harder than this. Just do it._

_Yeah, that’s easy to say._

_So you’re giving up, is that it? This is what finally gets better of you?_

“I haven’t made a habit out of having companions,” he says at last. “It’s never interested me. But calling Atem my companion . . . that interests me.”

“And you would say companionship is all you seek?” Akhenemkanon’s face gives nothing away--neither curiosity, nor disbelief, nor relief.

“Any more than that would depend on Atem’s opinion.” He pauses. The next part galls him, but there’s nothing he can do about it. “And whether you’d permit me to seek it.”

“Do you seek to make tribute?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You say ‘more than companionship.’” Akhenemkanon spreads his hands. “I assume by this you mean to seek my son’s favor. Which is to say, were you a woman, that you would seek to be his wife.”

Kaiba decides to overlook the wife part. There are worse analogies for what he wants; certainly he doesn’t know a word in Khemetic for a man who seeks to be another man’s husband. It probably happened at least once in the three thousand years Khemet existed, but that doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.

Of course, there are far better analogies, too.

“Hold on, I’m _seventeen years old_ \--”

“And from an important family, according to Atem, yet still unmarried?” Now Akhemkanon’s face shows something: something akin to worry.

_Wait. Right._

“Average lifespan in modern Japan is about three times what it was in Khemet. Most people don’t marry that young anymore. And I’m not looking to be an exception.”

“Then what is it that you seek?”

_Oh, hell._ “You know, I don’t even know what you’d call it in Khemetic. I don’t know if it _existed_ in Khemetic.”

“Explain.”

“We have a . . . system. Or custom. If you want to call it that. Where two people who are interested in each other spend time together and get to know each other. Sometimes they get married. Sometimes they don’t, but stay together because they like each others’ company. Sometimes they decide it’s not going to work out and look for other partners. If you’re going to spend the rest of your life with someone you should be reasonably assured you can at least tolerate them.”

“And how does this differ from friendship?”

“Because . . . ” He doesn’t have the energy for this. Or perhaps more precisely, he doesn’t have the _plans_ for this. Expressing his interest in the bathroom mirror was as far as he got. And he’s certainly not going to try to explain French kissing to Atem’s father. “Because it is.” He pauses. “You must have been married. You have a son.”

A dark expression passes over Akhenemkanon’s face--so quickly Kaiba almost doesn’t see it, but there it is, and he has to wonder how deep the feeling behind it must be to actually make a mark on the old king’s face. “I was.”

“Didn’t you ever just--spend time together? Because you wanted to?”

Akhenemkanon looks like he’s doing his damnedest to not look baffled, or angry. “I had a duty to fulfill. As did she.”

_Why do I feel like I’ve heard this before somewhere else?_

“I’m not entirely sure what the actual etiquette is for this conversation, but I’m pretty sure there’s no delicate way to point out _you’re all dead_ , if I can trust what Atem says.” Akhenemkanon opens his mouth. Kaiba cuts him off with a hand. “And alive. I’m still not sure how that works, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation if it wasn’t true.. But this--this isn’t _the world_ anymore. It’s an afterlife. Or other world. There are no wars for Atem to win, no murderers to pass judgment on. People who spent their lives spreading mayhem all got winnowed out in the process of getting here.”

“You speak the truth, yes.”

“Then why--”

_Ah._ That’s _where I’ve heard this before._

“Why does he have to follow the same path you did, instead of doing what makes him happy?”

Akhnemkanon steeples his fingers under his chin. There’s a long pause. Then--

“You do have a valid point, I suppose. There are few cases of one with a lost name re-entering Aaru, and those few I’ve seen have tried to pick up where last they ended. For Atem, this has not been an easy process. Most of those he loved long outlived him, and many faced second death. This is a thing I have never had to face, and this question is one never posed to me before.” He pauses, considering. At last his eyes look back to Kaiba’s face.

“Is it power you seek? Gold? Base pleasure?”

Kaiba shakes his head. No--this he knows for sure. “I had those things, once. The power and the money. Still do, in a lot of ways.”

“Then what will you give?”

Kaiba frowns. “I’m not going to buy a human being.”

“This is not a matter of slavery. It ensures you have the ability to uphold the responsibility you ask for.”

“You’re asking me to pay in order to spend time with someone, that’s slavery. Or prostitution. I’m not here for either one.”

Akhenemkanon stares at him. It’s unsettlingly familiar. _I will not be moved,_ the stare says. _You know this. You’ve tried it before._

Kaiba stares back until he realizes they could spend the entire night this way. At last he rubs his face.

_Fuck, I hate shit like this._

“I have an idea. You don’t like my custom. I don’t like yours.”

“Then we find ourselves at an impasse.”

“Not entirely. With all due respect, sir--” and he’s surprised he got through the word without irony, but he managed, and he’s going to continue to manage--“I realize you’re trying to do what’s best for your son. But it’s his opinion I want, not yours. Tell him about our conversation today and let me send him a message. If he agrees with you, that this ‘tribute’ is important, then I’ll make it. If he feels the demand is unfair, then the three of us will meet, all together, to find a solution acceptable to all of us.”

_I don’t think I’ve kissed this much ass since I was fourteen._

_Probably not, but you’re dealing with royalty. Ass-kissing comes with the territory._

_Does it have to?_

_Do you want to see Atem, or not?_

Akhenemkanon looks thoughtful. “I’ll acquiesce this far,” he agrees. “Give me your message.”

_You’re not actually going to do it._

_Are you?_

_This is what you’ve got left, after all the pain and effort, and--_

_And it’s all I’m ever going to have if I don’t let it go._

Kaiba takes a deep breath and reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a stack of cards and sorts through them.

_But you’re not_ really _going to do it, it’s just a game, just another game--_

He pulls three cards, stares down at them.

_All the pain, all the effort, all the misery, near-insanity, near-death, and--_

_And?_

He taps the cards into a single stack and returns the balance to his pocket. “He’ll know what it means.”

Akhenemkanon takes the cards gravely and bows his head, a single deep nod. “And if he should reject your message?”

“Then--”

_You could be losing_ everything _, you could be letting him walk away with the only thing you--_

“Then I’ll withdraw my request.”

Akhenemkanon nods that single deep bow again, and turns, and then he’s gone, and Kaiba is alone with his heart slamming in his chest hard enough to show through his shirt.

_You know what you probably just lost, right?_

Yes; yes. And no cost/benefit chart in the world would say he's made an intelligent decision.

_Yeah. But--_

\--but if they're in any hands but his, Atem’s are good hands to be in.

\--------------

The rain has stopped.

The window is still closed, but against humidity and heat, not an angry gale. In fact the night is clear and cloudless.

And Kaiba is sure he closed his curtains before bed--

\--and also sure there was no figure standing in the far corner, back to, pulling back one of the drapes.

He pulls himself up against the pillows. The scarab necklace tumbles out of his tee-shirt. He doesn’t bother tucking it back in; the person in the corner is making no secret of their presence, and isn’t, he doesn’t think, here to start trouble.

The person turns around and the curtain falls back, and what was just a shape resolves into Atem, hair down in braids and a smile hiding in the corners of his eyes, skin silvered by moonlight.

Kaiba wants to say _what are you doing here._ Or _this is a dream._

Instead he lays where he is, watching as Atem leaves the window and crosses the room, one hand by his side and the other held up to his heart. If Atem’s noticed he’s awake, it doesn’t show.

Atem reaches the bed. It has to be a dream, Kaiba thinks, Atem has never been in his room, and--

\--Atem smiles, crooked front teeth gleaming in the moonlight, and raises his free hand to push Kaiba’s bangs off his forehead, kissing his temple and curling his fingers over the hand Kaiba doesn’t have under the pillow before vanishing as quickly as he’s come.

Kaiba shakes his head, and then notices the chair by the window, where he was reading earlier tonight with the drapes pushed aside for extra light and catching on its back.

_It was an optical illusion,_ he thinks, and rolls over, feeling strangely empty, before closing his eyes.

When he opens them again, the moon has been replaced by bright September sun and Mokuba yelling _oh shit I’m late_ one room over. No surprises there; it’s how a lot of his days start.

He sits up, and then realizes:

He never replaced the scarab necklace under his shirt after waking up, but it’s tucked back in now even though the neck of his shirt is far too high-cut to allow it to fall back in.

And in his hand there’s something small, and hard, and approximately body-temperature. Plastic. 

He uncurls his fingers.

Sitting in his palm is a dark blue translucent D20 from the jar he took to Khemet, to the place Atem’s father called Aaru.

Nineteen of the numbers are gone. There’s just one left, bright white against dark blue highlighted in his palm by a bright beam of sunlight: 

_Natural twenty._

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, questions, concerns, meta, and all other forms of words are always welcome below!


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